Abstract
Robot-exposed occupations create one and a half to two times as much complementary work as AI-exposed occupations over the robot wave, and less afterwards. Whether that reflects a property of the two technologies or the distance each has travelled is what this paper decomposes. A two-frontier task model writes the reinstated mass as a reinstatement rate times how far the frontier has advanced, so in logs the gap splits into a frontier-width term and a rate term, which a task panel over two decades of occupational data measures. Frontier width carries most or all of it: across nine measures the implied relative rate straddles one, against the near five a calibration of this model imports. The reinstatement gap is mostly an exposure gap, on the reading that automation thresholds stand for frontier levels and a task description for one unit of the model’s continuum.
Status
Draft available upon request.