Evidence published in 2015 by Michaels and Graetz from a dataset of companies in 17 countries gathered between 1993 and 2007, suggests that while productivity increases with robotic innovation and some semi-skilled and lower skilled jobs are abandoned, “there is some evidence of diminishing marginal returns to robot use – ‘congestion effects’ -so they are not a panacea for growth……this makes robots’ contribution to the aggregate economy roughly on a par with previous important technologies, such as the railroads in the nineteenth century and the US highways in the twentieth century.” Neither do robots do away with the contradictions within capitalist accumulation.

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