The city has proven to be the most successful form of human agglomeration and
provides wide employment opportunities for its dwellers. As advances in
robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of
automation on jobs, a question looms: How will automation affect employment in
cities? Here, we provide a comparative picture of the impact of automation
across U.S. urban areas. Small cities will undertake greater adjustments, such
as worker displacement and job content substitutions. We demonstrate that large
cities exhibit increased occupational and skill specialization due to increased
abundance of managerial and technical professions. These occupations are not
easily automatable, and, thus, reduce the potential impact of automation in
large cities. Our results pass several robustness checks including potential
errors in the estimation of occupational automation and sub-sampling of
occupations. Our study provides the first empirical law connecting two societal
forces: urban agglomeration and automation's impact on employment
