Robocolleague

Labor and Capital

Robocolleague

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers

Jacek Depczye

The Economist

The sleeker, faster Watson is now being put to commercial use: its first application is suggesting treatments in cancer clinics. Many people fear that Watson exemplifies a trend toward the displacement of human workers by machines.

But plenty of research suggests that innovation need not translate into a shrinking role for human labour. In a new paper David Autor, also of MIT, argues that the standard “production functions” used by economists to describe how things get made need sprucing up. These functions treat labour and capital like separate elements in a recipe: mix a tablespoon of skilled work with a dose of capital to produce a helping of GDP. In the real world, however, the distinction is blurred.

A firm’s challenge is to decide how to allocate them between capital and workers of varying skills, according to their respective comparative advantages. Assignments evolve over time as costs and technologies shift: an innovation may displace humans from some jobs, for instance, but make them more productive in others.

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