The U.S. is still in the midst of a pandemic-prompted recession, with August’s national unemployment rate at 8.4% — 4.7 point higher than the previous year. And many of those newly unemployed won’t see their jobs return.

Findings presented during a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia webinar suggest that COVID-19 has accelerated automation across industries, and minority groups and service workers have been widely affected.

The September event examined previous recessions and the current recession to understand ways to deal with the negative outcomes presented by an accelerated rate of jobs being replaced by technology. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and researcher David H. Autor; Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia senior economic advisor Lei Ding and Future Works Strategy founder Anne Gemmell contributed to these takeaways:

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