A new study finds that technology increases job growth in occupations: Rather than displacing employees, it changes the nature of their work.
A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute, … concluded that many work tasks within jobs can be automated in the next three to five years. But the impact, according to the McKinsey report, will be to alter jobs rather than eliminate them.
Mr. [James] Bessen’s research and the McKinsey report do not necessarily counter the more grim forecasts of the future impact of automation. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, researchers at Oxford University, projected in a paper published two years ago that 47 percent of American jobs were at risk from automation. But they were looking to a further horizon, 20 years from now.
The other big variable is the course of technological progress, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, and whether it will work more to improve human capabilities or replace them. There is plenty of debate on that front.
Three excellent books on robotics, published recently, each take up that subject and come to somewhat different conclusions: “The Rise of the Robots,” by Martin Ford; “Humans Need Not Apply,” by Jerry Kaplan; and “Machines of Loving Grace,” by John Markoff, who is a reporter at The New York Times.
In his research, Mr. Bessen found that while technology did not eliminate jobs over all, it was a source of turmoil in the labor market. It is a force for wage inequality as computer-intensive occupations displace other occupations. Desktop publishing, for example, greatly increased the demand for graphic designers, but they often replaced typographers in the 1980s.
The policy implication of his research, Mr. Bessen said, is to promote public policies that make it easier for workers to get vocational education and move to new jobs. By contrast, if technology becomes an inexorable job killer across the economy, then policies like a guaranteed minimum wage begin to look more appealing.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/134729153667
