Masayuki Morikawa How will automation affect the future of employment? Policymakers, journalists, and academics alike are all attracted by this question due to the fear of the replacement of human jobs by machines. Taking up the industrial robots as an example, Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020) indeed draw a dismal picture that the penetration of industrial robots in the US depressed both employment and wages of workers of all educational backgrounds. To what degree can this experience be extrapolated to other regions and other times? In Adachi et al. (2020b), we address this question by looking at Japan’s long-term experience spanning four decades from 1978 to 2017.