It seems clear that the economics press has overplayed the Acemoglu and Restrepo paper. And they show that according to Acemoglu and Restrepo's own estimation, the negative impact of Chinese competition on US jobs was more than three times larger than the effect of robots. Mishel and Bivens note that productivity growth and corporate investment in information technology has fallen, which also doesn't fit with a story of accelerating automation. They note that workers haven't been changing occupations as much as they did in past decades - if people were losing their jobs to automation at a faster rate, we'd expect them to have to retrain more frequently. Mishel and Bivens also give some other reasons to be sceptical of Acemoglu and Restrepo's findings. If these machines are one of only a few kinds of automation that are causing job losses, and other forms of automation are complementing human beings and creating new jobs, the labour market is probably in good shape.
Most automated-production technologies, from self-checkout kiosks to machine-learning algorithms to automated phone-answering machines, might be called "robots" in common parlance, but the definition of robot used by Acemoglu and Restrepo is limited to fully autonomous multipurpose machines with no human operators.
"Robots," you see, are actually a very narrowly defined type of automation. As Acemoglu and Restrepo themselves wrote: "(Our results) suggest that other types of capital equipment and even computers tend to increase the demand for labour." This result underscores the possibility - though certainly does not prove - that industrial robots might have a very different impact on employment and wages than other types of recent technologies.