If a robot takes your job, your pay eventually bounces back; if AI takes it, you’re looking at a permanent financial slump.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6298962
The Takeaway
Because physical robots are machines that exist in a real place, they create 'spatially bundled' local jobs for maintenance and quality control, leading to a 'V-shaped' wage recovery for humans. Digital AI produces outputs that are non-spatial, creating five times fewer local complementary jobs and leaving displaced workers with no path to wage recovery.
From the abstract
Robot-exposed occupations follow V-shaped wage trajectories-decline then recoverywhile AI-exposed occupations follow L-shapes with no recovery. I develop a twofrontier task model in which the direction of automation and the rate of complementary task creation are jointly determined. Physical automation produces spatially bundled complements-maintenance, monitoring, quality control-because automated and human tasks are co-located , cognitive automation produces fewer complements because its outpu