Erik Brynjolfsson has spent the last several years building one of the most detailed empirical pictures of how technology is reshaping the American workforce—and the picture keeps getting darker for workers at the bottom of the corporate ladder.
Last August, the Stanford economist, who has been a thought leader on artificial intelligence (AI) for years, made headlines when he and his team published a first-of-its-kind study revealing the AI revolution was already having a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market,” particularly young people ages 22 to 25 in white-collar fields like software engineering and customer service.
Now, in a new working paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research this February, Brynjolfsson and a team of co-authors have trained their lens on blue-collar America—and found minimum wage increases are accelerating the adoption of industrial robots on factory floors.
Taken together, the two papers trace the outlines of a labor market transformation that is squeezing workers from both ends: AI encroaching from the top, automation moving in from the bottom.
The white-collar warning shot
The August 2025 study was built on an unusually powerful dataset—high-frequency payroll records from millions of American workers generated by ADP, the largest payroll software firm in the country. What Brynjolfsson and his co-authors found was striking: Since the widespread adoption of generative AI tools beginning in late 2022, employment for early-career workers in the most AI-exposed occupations fell by 13% on a relative basis, even after controlling for broader firm-level disruptions. Older, more experienced workers in the same fields, meanwhile, saw their employment hold steady or grow.
The new study, co-authored with J. Frank Li of the University of British Columbia, Javier Miranda of Germany’s Halle Institute for Economic Research, Robert Seamans of NYU’s Stern School of Business, and Andrew J. Wang of Stanford, turns from algorithm to assembly line. Using confidential U.S. Census Bureau microdata linked to customs import records, the team tracked industrial robot adoption among roughly 240,000 single-unit U.S. manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2021—identifying robot adopters by the moment they began importing machines from overseas suppliers in Japan, Germany, and Switzerland.
The central finding is precise and consistent: A 10% increase in the minimum wage is associated with an approximately 8% increase in the likelihood a manufacturing firm will adopt industrial robots, relative to the average adoption rate in the sample.
“Firms subject to higher minimum wages are more likely to adopt robots,” the authors wrote, “even after controlling for observable firm and local economic characteristics.”
The logic mirrors the white-collar story, even if the mechanism is different, with the authors arguing these effects are “economically meaningful.” Just as AI becomes economically attractive when it can replace the codified work of a junior software engineer