Last year when we were preparing for the AI and ML panel at the Markets Group meeting, we spent a lot of effort to prepare for questions on potential and actual adverse effects – but no-one asked. The audience were institutional investors, many of them managing pension funds for employees, so we really had expected pointed questions about the potential for removal of existing jobs and about how new occupations might arise.
Prompted by a blog post from Timothy Taylor, and quoting from a paper titled ‘The Wrong Kind of AI’ , it seems useful to think “about the future of work as a race between automation and new, labor-intensive tasks. Labor demand has not increased steadily over the last two centuries because of technologies that have made labor more productive in everything. Rather, many new technologies have sought to eliminate labor from tasks in which it previously specialized. All the same, labor has benefited from advances in technology, because other technologies have simultaneously enabled the introduction of new labor-intensive tasks. These new tasks have done more than just reinstate labor as a central input into the production process; they have also played a vital role in productivity growth.”
References
IZA DP No. 12292 Institue of Labor Economics The Wrong Kind of AI?
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Labor Demand APRIL 2019
Daron Acemoglu MIT and IZA
Pascual Restrepo Boston University
Cunning Systems 