Stephen Jen
LONDON, August 19 (Reuters) - Is technology more job augmenting or job replacing? This has been a long-standing debate. But recent academic work suggests that technology has been a net destroyer of jobs for decades.
Artificial intelligence and robotics could rapidly accelerate this trend, with significant implications for inflation, the size of government and U.S.-China relations.
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Over the long arc of history, technological advances have enabled industries to emerge, as workers, released from "older" jobs by machines, have been able to transition into newer ones.
Indeed, 60% of workers today are employed in occupations that did not exist in 1940, or 74 percent if we consider just the professional category, which added the most workers during the past eight decades.
However, recent academic research, opens new tab suggests we may have reached an inflection point in the U.S., whereby technology is now destroying more jobs than it is creating.
David Autor, an economist at MIT and winner of the 2005 John Clark Bates Medal, argues that since 1980, the jobs replaced by automation have not been fully offset by new jobs created.
This reflects the pace of technological change and the fact that advancements are now increasingly focused on “professional, technical, and managerial occupations,” Autor notes, rather than lower-skilled work.
He finds that machines that are more powerful than an average human (e.g., a tractor) are typically labour-augmenting and productivity-enhancing, while machines that are also smarter than the average human tend to be labour-substituting.
And AI is on pace to be a lot smarter than most humans.
While forms of AI have been around since the 1940s, the immense computing power resulting from advances in semiconductor technologies has now allowed machines to attain multidimensional intelligence.
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