When Americans consider how technology has changed their lives, they tend to focus on how the internet and smartphones have altered how they watch TV, connect with friends, or how they shop. But those changes pale in comparison to how technology has already restructured the economy, shaking up the workforce and shifting opportunity to tech-centric urban hubs. As artificial intelligence quickly moves from fiction to daily reality, that revolution will arguably become much more consequential.
Economists broadly agree that technology will continue to be an engine of economic growth. But it also will upend old certainties about who benefits. Already, we can see a growing inequality gap, with winners and losers by region and workplace. The next wave of changes, handled badly, could make this gap even more extreme.
MIT researcher David Autor has been at the center of that conversation for two decades now. One of the world’s premier labor economists, Autor has helped drive a reconsideration of how Americans are really coping with the changes transforming their workplaces. And he's trying to take the conversation beyond the ivory tower: His 2016 TED talk about the surprising impact of automation, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?” has been viewed more than 1.3 million times.
Autor's interest comes from seeing these changes at the ground level: Fresh out of Tufts University with a degree in psychology, he ended up running a Silicon Valley-sponsored computer-training program for at-risk children and adults at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, a counterculture hot spot. When he headed back to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for an M.A. and then Ph.D. in public policy, he brought a newly keen interest in figuring out how the technologies being pumped in to the labor market would shape what it means to be a worker in the United States. (...)
We’ve just started to think seriously as a nation about who wins and who doesn’t as the American workplace automates. In 1998, you co-wrote a paper that showed the rise of technology in the workplace was actually proving to be good for higher-skilled workers. Is that a fair read?
What that paper suggested was that it's definitely the case that automation is raising the demand for skilled labor. And the work that I've done since has been about what set of activities are complemented by automation and which set of activities is displaced, pointing out that on the one hand, there were tasks that were creative and analytical, and on the other, tasks that required dexterity and flexibility, which were very difficult to automate. So the middle of the skill distribution, where there are well understood rules and procedures, is actually much more susceptible to automation.
So, there's a hollowing out of middle-class jobs, but high-skilled, high-wage workers and the low-skilled low-wage workers remain? Is that what we're seeing play out right now in the U.S.?
That polarization of jobs definitely reduced the set of opportunities for people who don't have a college degree. People who have a high school or lower degree, it used to be they were in manufacturing, in clerical and administrative support. Now, increasingly, they're in cleaning, home health, security, etc. Ironically, we've automated some of the stuff that was more interesting for us, and we're left with some of the stuff that is less interesting. (...)
“Automation anxiety" is overblown, you’ve said. How anxious should American workers be?
People are talking about how robots are going to take all the jobs, but we're in a time of very dramatic employment growth and have been for a decade. Job growth is robust throughout western Europe, as well. So, we're certainly not in a period where there's any outward sign that work is coming to an end. We have had two centuries of people worrying very vocally about how automation will make us superfluous. I don't think it's made us superfluous, and I don't think it's on the verge of making us superfluous.
The greater concern is not about the number of jobs but whether those jobs will pay decent wages and people will have sufficient skills to do them. That's the great challenge. It's never been a better time to be a highly educated worker in the western world. But there hasn't been a worse time to be a high school dropout or high school graduate. (...)
In just the past year, Silicon Valley as an industry has developed a good and evil reputation. It’s cutting-edge and pays well, but it sometimes disrupts the world without seeming to care too much about the consequences, a la Uber. Which is it?
I don't think it's either. It creates a lot of benefits as well as creating real challenges: It's definitely the case that it's raising total GDP, but has been very dis-equalizing. It is up to our institutions to deal well with that or not.
Some countries have done a much better job at sharing the gains and making sure that everybody's bought in. Others have been much more social Darwinists about it, and the U.S. is very much at the extreme of that among industrialized economies, of going, ‘rah rah,’ to the winners and ‘too bad for you,’ to the losers.
How, exactly, are other countries good at it?
Countries that, I think, are doing really well with this—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria—have very good educational systems that prepare people not just for highly educated, Ph.D.-level jobs, but also very good vocational, technical education systems.
But there’s also the notion that there are multiple stakeholders in the economy, not just shareholders. Workers have more voice, and that makes people less apprehensive about these changes because they expect that if they are gains, they'll get a piece of them, where in the U.S. a lot of people think, ‘Well, there might be a gain, but I'll be worse off.’ And they're probably right.
Other countries have made it a lot easier for people to feel comfortable about the changes they're bringing on themselves. I think that’s one diagnosis of the current U.S. political system.
You’ve noted in your work that LBJ created a “Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress” way back in 1964. I didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that or saddened by that—that we’ve been talking about these questions for a long time and don’t seem to have any better answers.
There are two schools of thought that you hear often. One is, ‘the sky is falling, the robots are coming for our jobs, we're all screwed because we've made ourselves obsolete.’ The other version you also hear a lot is, ‘We've been through things like this in the past, it's all worked out fine, it took care of itself, don't worry.’ And I think both of these are really wrong.
I've already indicated why I think the first view is wrong. The reason I think the second view is wrong is because I don't think it took care of itself. Countries have very different levels of quality of life, institutional quality, of democracy, of liberty and opportunity, and those are not because they have different markets or different technologies. It's because they've made different institutional arrangements. Look at the example of Norway and Saudi Arabia, two oil-rich countries. Norway is a very happy place. It's economically mobile with high rates of labor force participation, high rates of education, good civil society. And Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has high standards of living, but it's not a very happy place because they've stifled innovation and individual freedom. Those are two examples of taking the same technology, which is oil wealth, and either squandering it or investing it successfully.
I think the right lesson from history is that this is an opportunity. Things that raise GDP and make us more productive, they definitely create aggregate wealth. The question is, how do we use that wealth well to have a society that's mobile, that's prosperous, that's open? Or do we use it to basically make some people very wealthy and keep everyone else quiet? So, I think we are at an important juncture, and I don't think the U.S. is dealing with it especially well. Our institutions are very much under threat at a time when they're arguably most needed.
Economists broadly agree that technology will continue to be an engine of economic growth. But it also will upend old certainties about who benefits. Already, we can see a growing inequality gap, with winners and losers by region and workplace. The next wave of changes, handled badly, could make this gap even more extreme.
MIT researcher David Autor has been at the center of that conversation for two decades now. One of the world’s premier labor economists, Autor has helped drive a reconsideration of how Americans are really coping with the changes transforming their workplaces. And he's trying to take the conversation beyond the ivory tower: His 2016 TED talk about the surprising impact of automation, “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?” has been viewed more than 1.3 million times.Autor's interest comes from seeing these changes at the ground level: Fresh out of Tufts University with a degree in psychology, he ended up running a Silicon Valley-sponsored computer-training program for at-risk children and adults at San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church, a counterculture hot spot. When he headed back to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for an M.A. and then Ph.D. in public policy, he brought a newly keen interest in figuring out how the technologies being pumped in to the labor market would shape what it means to be a worker in the United States. (...)
We’ve just started to think seriously as a nation about who wins and who doesn’t as the American workplace automates. In 1998, you co-wrote a paper that showed the rise of technology in the workplace was actually proving to be good for higher-skilled workers. Is that a fair read?
What that paper suggested was that it's definitely the case that automation is raising the demand for skilled labor. And the work that I've done since has been about what set of activities are complemented by automation and which set of activities is displaced, pointing out that on the one hand, there were tasks that were creative and analytical, and on the other, tasks that required dexterity and flexibility, which were very difficult to automate. So the middle of the skill distribution, where there are well understood rules and procedures, is actually much more susceptible to automation.
So, there's a hollowing out of middle-class jobs, but high-skilled, high-wage workers and the low-skilled low-wage workers remain? Is that what we're seeing play out right now in the U.S.?
That polarization of jobs definitely reduced the set of opportunities for people who don't have a college degree. People who have a high school or lower degree, it used to be they were in manufacturing, in clerical and administrative support. Now, increasingly, they're in cleaning, home health, security, etc. Ironically, we've automated some of the stuff that was more interesting for us, and we're left with some of the stuff that is less interesting. (...)
“Automation anxiety" is overblown, you’ve said. How anxious should American workers be?
People are talking about how robots are going to take all the jobs, but we're in a time of very dramatic employment growth and have been for a decade. Job growth is robust throughout western Europe, as well. So, we're certainly not in a period where there's any outward sign that work is coming to an end. We have had two centuries of people worrying very vocally about how automation will make us superfluous. I don't think it's made us superfluous, and I don't think it's on the verge of making us superfluous.
The greater concern is not about the number of jobs but whether those jobs will pay decent wages and people will have sufficient skills to do them. That's the great challenge. It's never been a better time to be a highly educated worker in the western world. But there hasn't been a worse time to be a high school dropout or high school graduate. (...)
In just the past year, Silicon Valley as an industry has developed a good and evil reputation. It’s cutting-edge and pays well, but it sometimes disrupts the world without seeming to care too much about the consequences, a la Uber. Which is it?
I don't think it's either. It creates a lot of benefits as well as creating real challenges: It's definitely the case that it's raising total GDP, but has been very dis-equalizing. It is up to our institutions to deal well with that or not.
Some countries have done a much better job at sharing the gains and making sure that everybody's bought in. Others have been much more social Darwinists about it, and the U.S. is very much at the extreme of that among industrialized economies, of going, ‘rah rah,’ to the winners and ‘too bad for you,’ to the losers.
How, exactly, are other countries good at it?
Countries that, I think, are doing really well with this—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria—have very good educational systems that prepare people not just for highly educated, Ph.D.-level jobs, but also very good vocational, technical education systems.
But there’s also the notion that there are multiple stakeholders in the economy, not just shareholders. Workers have more voice, and that makes people less apprehensive about these changes because they expect that if they are gains, they'll get a piece of them, where in the U.S. a lot of people think, ‘Well, there might be a gain, but I'll be worse off.’ And they're probably right.
Other countries have made it a lot easier for people to feel comfortable about the changes they're bringing on themselves. I think that’s one diagnosis of the current U.S. political system.
You’ve noted in your work that LBJ created a “Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress” way back in 1964. I didn’t know whether to be encouraged by that or saddened by that—that we’ve been talking about these questions for a long time and don’t seem to have any better answers.
There are two schools of thought that you hear often. One is, ‘the sky is falling, the robots are coming for our jobs, we're all screwed because we've made ourselves obsolete.’ The other version you also hear a lot is, ‘We've been through things like this in the past, it's all worked out fine, it took care of itself, don't worry.’ And I think both of these are really wrong.
I've already indicated why I think the first view is wrong. The reason I think the second view is wrong is because I don't think it took care of itself. Countries have very different levels of quality of life, institutional quality, of democracy, of liberty and opportunity, and those are not because they have different markets or different technologies. It's because they've made different institutional arrangements. Look at the example of Norway and Saudi Arabia, two oil-rich countries. Norway is a very happy place. It's economically mobile with high rates of labor force participation, high rates of education, good civil society. And Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy that has high standards of living, but it's not a very happy place because they've stifled innovation and individual freedom. Those are two examples of taking the same technology, which is oil wealth, and either squandering it or investing it successfully.
I think the right lesson from history is that this is an opportunity. Things that raise GDP and make us more productive, they definitely create aggregate wealth. The question is, how do we use that wealth well to have a society that's mobile, that's prosperous, that's open? Or do we use it to basically make some people very wealthy and keep everyone else quiet? So, I think we are at an important juncture, and I don't think the U.S. is dealing with it especially well. Our institutions are very much under threat at a time when they're arguably most needed.
by Nancy Scola, Politico | Read more:
Image: Porter Gifford
