Will the Workplace of the Future Have Any Workers?
Technological Change, Employment, and the Structure of Jobs
Thursday, November 20, 2014 · 4 - 5 PM
This talk by MIT professor David Autor offers a conceptual and
empirical overview of the evolving relationship between computer
capability and human skill demands. He begins by sketching historical
thinking about machine displacement of human labor---which is primarily a
series of grim and ultimately incorrect predictions about collapsing
employment and excess leisure. He next considers the impact of
computerization on industrialized country labor market over the
last three decades, which is seen in the phenomenon of labor market "polarization" -- meaning the simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage and low-education, low-wages jobs. He
will finally reflect on how recent advances in artificial intelligence
and robotics may shape the trajectory of employment growth, occupational
change and skill demands in coming decades. A key observation of the
talk is that journalists and expert commentators overstate the extent of
machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong
complementarities that increase productivity, raise earnings, and
augment demand for skilled labor. The challenges to substituting
machines for workers in tasks requiring flexibility, judgment, and
common sense remain immense, primarily because humans apply tacit skills
and knowledge that have proved extraordinarily difficult to codify. Contemporary
computer science seeks to overcome this challenge by building machines
that learn from human examples, thus inferring the rules that we tacitly
apply but do not explicitly understand.