Computers and cyborgs aren't about to render the American worker obsolete. But they are tilting the U.S. economy more and more in favor of the rich and away from the poor and the middle class, new economic research contends.
Despite rising fears of technology displacing huge swaths of the U.S. workforce, there remain huge classes of jobs that robots — and low-wage foreign workers — still can't replace in the nation, and won't replace any time soon.
To land the best of those jobs, workers need sophisticated vocabularies, advanced problem-solving abilities and other high-value skills that the U.S. economy does a good job of bestowing on young people from wealthy families — but cannot seem to deliver to poor and middle-class youths.