There’s no doubt technology is shaking up the American workplace. Amazon employs more than 100,000 robots in its US warehouses, alongside more than 125,000 human workers. Sears and Brookstone, icons of brick and mortar retailing, are both bankrupt. But as machines and software get ever smarter, how many more workers will they displace, and which ones?

Economists who study employment have pushed back against recent predictions by Silicon Valley soothsayers like Elon Musk of an imminent tidal wave of algorithmic unemployment. The evidence indicates US workers will instead be lapped by the gentler swells of a gradual revolution, in which jobs are transformed piecemeal as machines grow more capable. Now a new study predicts that young, Hispanic, and black workers will be most affected by that creeping disruption. Men will suffer more changes to their work than women.

The analysis, from the Brookings Institution, suggests that just as the dividends of recent economic growth have been distributed unevenly, so too will the disruptive effects of automation. In both cases, nonwhite, less economically secure workers lose out.

“In general we see a rather manageable transition [for most workers], especially those who have a bachelor's degree,” says Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings. The study estimates only one in four jobs is likely to be greatly changed by automation over the next two decades, and history suggests that new technology will also create new jobs. “What is less reassuring is that beneath that broader arc, there is significant variation across geography and demographics.”

The Brookings Institution

The Brookings study drew its data from the research arm of consultancy McKinsey, which estimated the share of tasks for different occupations that could be automated by 2040. Food preparation scores as 91 percent automatable, compared with software development at 8 percent. Combining those ratings with government data on the US workforce revealed who might find algorithms assuming their work tasks first.

Brookings created a kind of weather map that shows the Rust Belt city of Toledo, Ohio, as the metro area most exposed to the power of machines that can take over workers’ tasks. Washington, DC is the least exposed. That fits with how recent AI advances have made computers good at simple and repetitive tasks, but not the kind of reasoning and persuasion characteristic of high-level bureaucracy, lobbying, or lawyering.

The Brookings Institution

Drilling into demographics on the US workforce revealed who is most likely to be challenged by automation. On average, half of the tasks performed by workers aged 16 to 24 can be automated over the next couple of decades, the report says, compared with just 40 percent of the tasks of older workers. Hispanic workers are in jobs that are already 47 percent automatable; for Native American and black workers, those shares are 45 and 44 percent, respectively. For the average white worker, according to the study, only 40 percent of their job is within reach of machines in the next two decades.