A white paper published today, based partially on government data, concludes that the more robots there are in the workforce, the more jobs are created.

    The study by the Association for Advancing Automation, titled "Robots Fuel the Next Wave of U.S. Productivity and Job Growth," is based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data and other sources, and its authors say it provides evidence that the act of modern machines taking over traditional human tasks should be welcomed, not feared, a conclusion that stands in contrast to numerous other reports.

    “It’s counterintuitive, but when robot sales are rising, unemployment is falling. When robot sales fall, unemployment rises,” said Jeff Burnstein, president of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3) during a phone conversation last week. "That tells you, it cannot be that robots are putting people out of work.”

    The white paper concludes that during the non-recessionary periods of 1996-2000, 2002-2007, and 2010-2014, general employment and robot shipments both increased. While the number of robot shipments increased from about 17,000 in 2011 to about 23,000 in 2013, the total number of robots compared to people is still a tiny fraction.

    Citing data from the National Association of Manufacturers, the manufacturing industry supports about 17.6 million jobs in the United States, according to the study.

Burnstein, who has been president of A3 for 32 years says there’s a “fundamental misunderstanding about what the job-killers are. The number one job killer in the world is if you work for a company that can’t compete. That’s when the jobs go away.”

    But not everyone interprets BLS data the same way. In an interview today, Wendall Wallach, Yale University's scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chair of the Center’s research group on technology and ethics said that while short-term unemployment numbers can be used to explain a wide variety of perspectives the real concern is how the productivity gains are distributed.

    "Every time you give a robot a human job all the productivity gain goes to the owners of the capital," said Wallach, who published "A Dangerous Masters: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control," in June. "None of it goes to wages."

    Last month Wallach spoke at the World Summit on Technological Unemployment at the Time Life Conference Center in New York City. Today he said that among the attendees there was "near universal sentiment" that the main reason for concern isn't jobs, "There will always be something to do," he said, but over pay.

    The Association for Advancing Automation is the umbrella group for Robotic Industries Association (RIA), founded in 1974, AIA Advancing Vision + Imaging, founded in 1984 and Motion Control & Motors Association (MCMA) founded in 2005. Collectively it represents about 850 automation manufacturers, component suppliers, system integrators, end users, research groups and consulting firms from around the world.

    “We’ve seen information put out that we consider to be misleading or very wrong,” said Burnstein. “So what we decided to do was take a look at this ourselves. We have seen studies that were positive, but we wanted to see if we could find evidence of our own. So that’s what we’ve attempted to do here.”