note that: "There is renewed concern that with the striking advances in automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence (sic), we are on the verge of seeing them realized. The mounting evidence that the automation of a range of low-skill and medium-skill occupations has contributed to wage inequality and employment polarization adds to these worries."
Then there's a big caveat.
"These concerns notwithstanding, we have little systematic evidence of the equilibrium impact of these new technologies, and especially of robots, on employment and wages."
Even if the presumed technological advances materialize, there is no guarantee that firms would choose to automate; that would depend on the costs of substituting machines for labor and how much wages change in response to this threat.
In other words, it may be advantageous not to buy the robot to replace the workers.
"Second, the labor market impacts of new technologies depend not only on where they hit but also on the adjustment in other parts of the economy. For example, other sectors and occupations might expand to soak up the labor freed from the tasks that are now performed by machines, and productivity improvements due to new machines may even expand employment in affected."
So how is that labour substitution coming along?
In a little-noticed interview this week, Lior Ron of Uber's Otto division struck a new, conciliatory tone. Ron agreed that there is a national shortage of trucking jobs and positions his technology as a trucker's companion – a "co-pilot" – not her (or his) replacement.
And when Alphabet spun out its self-driving cars unit, allowing it to focus on licensing more modest gains, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said: "We are not in the business of making better cars. We are in the business of making better drivers." Ah.
Otto. Well done, chaps.
Just as neural nets helped speech recognition make big gains, it isn't hard to envisage the classification benefits of new deep learning tools as being genuinely useful in other narrow fields of archiving and data analysis, where the "machine" doesn't have to "learn" too much. But in many cases these are likely to be adjuncts, rather than direct competition to human labour.
So perhaps someone should tell the apocalypse-addicted thinkfluencers who created the hype? The Economist has produced a one-minute video for social media which blames automation for the rise in "populism". It predicts a bloodbath of "five million" working-class jobs as automation increases dramatically. But the video is already out of date. The example it uses is, er... Uber's Otto. ®
Your reporter pinched the phrase "displacement anxiety" to explain the phenomenon of middle-class pundits having a panic attack about robots taking middle-class jobs, which is what created today's hype. Much of what required judgement is now ceded to processes. But perhaps the middle classes have so thoroughly hollowed themselves out as humans, they now secretly wish to be replaced by machines, greeting their arrival with the enthusiasm of the euphoric cults who welcome the aliens in the movie Independence Day. Low self-esteem, perhaps?
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