Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and this is a bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio.

In 2021, we put out an episode about the future of robots in the workforce. It featured a couple

economists who had been studying how robots or co-bots for collaborative robots were being

used in Japanese nursing homes.

Those same economists recently put out a follow-up paper, so we thought we'd replay the

original episode with updated facts and figures, and then hear about the new research findings.

We've also got some robot news from an American nursing home. So here is the updated

episode. It's called How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Apocalypse.

We might as well start with an economist.

No. No. I'm not even a real economist. I just play one at MIT.

That's David Otter. He is a real economist. He's been on the show a few times before.

His path to economics professor was indirect.

I started as an undergraduate Columbia. I dropped out after three

semesters. I worked. I rode a motorcycle. I went back and completed my undergraduate degree at Tufts.

A couple years later, I studied psychology with concentration in computer science, and I really

didn't know what to do with myself. So he did some temping, he did construction, he worked at

McDonald's, then he went back to school again and got a PhD in public policy, so not the typical

path for a labor economist at MIT, and that real-world experience is reflected in David Otter's work.

My work is very concrete. I'm not a high theorist. I'm very much driven by practical problems.

A lot of the questions I studied are related to the things I worked on and saw firsthand,

working in poor communities, working in places undergoing political upheaval, watching the

Gulf of Inequality expand in the information age.

...