There is a far better literature arguing that innovation is getting harder rather than the robots are coming for all our jobs.
I do love a good piece of applied theory. I think of applied theory as the following. Gather some set of stylized facts about the world. Make zero attempt whatsoever to identify causal arguments from the data itself; no IV estimation, no discontinuity design, no random assignment, no natural experiments, etc. Rather, write a model of economic behavior which can simultaneously generate all of the above facts. To the extent that the model also implies some other facts about the world, don’t worry about it; the model is a metaphor, as I’ve discussed on this site in the past. I don’t mean to imply that a model is good iff it can explain some limited sphere we care about, as Friedman argued. I mean a model is good if it can provide a plausible guide to our thinking about an inherently messy social science problem: that is what is meant…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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