DETROIT – It's not shocking that places like Michigan and Ohio are leading in industrial robots, being a manufacturing capital, but new numbers show it's not even close.
A study released by the Brookings Institute shows Metro Detroit with nearly five times more industrial robots than any other major U.S. city.
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Michigan accounts for nearly 28,000 robots, about 12 percent of the nation's total.
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Between 2010 and 2015, Metro Detroit saw a 21 percent increase in industrial robots, with about 8.5 robots per thousand workers.
The auto industry accounts for nearly half of all industrial robot use in the U.S., and Metro Detroit is leading the way.
Here's more from the Brookings study:
Focusing on the largest metros along the Interstate corridor from Indiana to Alabama, auto-intense metro Detroit—with more than 15,000 industrial robots in place or 8.5 per 1,000 workers—dominates the map with more than three times the number of installed robots of other metros. Other major manufacturing centers like Toledo, Grand Rapids, Louisville, and Nashville also loom large. Each of these metros saw a tripling of the number of their robots in operation during the post-crisis auto boom between 2010 and 2015. Among these metros, the number of robots for every 1,000 workers now ranges from 4.8 in Nashville to 6.3 in Grand Rapids, and nine in Toledo (compared to incidences of less than one in dozens of Western cities). Regardless of whether these robot densities are meaningfully limiting aggregate employment in these metros, as Acemoglu and Restrepo claim in their paper, there is no doubt that robotics are playing a substantial role in shaping the dynamics of many, though by no means all, local economies.
The study also found, although not conclusively, that "red states" had a higher robot rate than "blue states" - suggesting manufacturing bubbles like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania turned "red" because of it.
This is not to say robots determined the outcome of the 2016 election. However, the red-state robot concentration does suggest that to the extent industrial automation brings difficult labor market transitions and anxiety, it will visit those difficulties most heavily on a particular swath of red-leaning America—specifically, the most robot-exposed locations in the industrial Midwest. To be sure, the disruption that will come with the continued adoption of broader “office” technologies like artificial intelligence will likely be felt on a wider national scale. But for its part, the robot portion of the automation fear is, and should continue to be, more confined.