“For existing operators, they find that automation had real costs. Operators in a city that transitioned to mechanical switching were substantially less likely to have any job 10 years later than operators in cities that were slower to automate; those that did find work tended to find worse, lower-paying jobs.
But Feigenbaum and Gross also examine the results for young white women coming of age during automation, who just a few years earlier would’ve been ideal candidates for telephone operator jobs. Remarkably, they find little or no negative effects at all: they were just as likely to find work as they would have been before, and job openings in fields like secretarial work and restaurants increased even as telephone operation was automated away. Some of those jobs (like restaurant work) paid less, but others were competitive with telephone operation.
This is just one case, and economists have a long way to go in understanding how automation affects workers — a question that is more important than ever with the rapid progress in AI. But telephone operation appears like a mostly heartening example. Even though a job that once employed 2 percent of all working women was automated away, new workers entering the labor market were not significantly worse off.”