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October 03, 2026
Partner, Chief Economist
This new paper from Anthropic finds that robots will only be able to replace 300,000 jobs in the US economy. For comparison, total employment in the US economy is 160 million. Even under aggressive projections, widespread displacement of physical labor will take decades, and historical cost decline rates suggest it would take 40 years to reach cost parity for even 10% of jobs.
Consider nursing and general repair, where present-day robots can do almost none of the work, or the electrician threading cable through a finished wall and the home health aide lifting a frail patient, tasks that look routine to an outsider and remain close to untouchable in practice.
In fact, much of the automation that will arrive this decade has nothing to do with large language models. Car washes that scan vehicles to aim their sprayers, warehouse sortation lines and autonomous vehicles all descend from sensing and control work that was well underway before large language models arrived and would almost certainly have happened anyway.
The bottom line is that the hardest physical work is harder to automate than the consensus assumes, and the automation we do get will owe more to decades of mechanical engineering than to the current moment in AI. Almost all jobs are bundles of simple and complicated tasks, so robots that can handle the simple part still cannot do the job, which is why, for the vast majority of workers, the mess is the moat.
For investors, the conclusion is that job losses in the economy will be modest, held back by cost, by the fine manipulation robots cannot manage, by regulation and by a simple human preference for human hands.
Displacement of workers is also only one side of the ledger. US business formation stands at the highest level in the nation's history, new firms are where new jobs come from and the net effect on employment is likely to be positive by a wide margin.
The conclusion is that robots are not coming for your job, because very few jobs are a single automatable task. In other words, your job is a mess.
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