David Autor

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“It Does Create Challenges And They Are Distributional Challenges”

December 10, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

MIT’s David Autor has bet the under on the Second Digital Age destroying jobs, though you might not agree these days if you invested your life savings in the value of a taxi medallion. He believes the short- and mid-term fears of the rise of the machines are unfounded and have crossed into hysteria. Time will tell, but he does acknowledge that the shifting of McJobs from high school juniors to those approaching senior citizen age is a downward spiral.

In conversation with Social Europe Editor-in-Chief Henning Meyer, Autor explains how two very different nations, Norway and Saudi Arabia, have taken vastly different approaches to abundance, a wonderful thing not always evenly distributed. What’s left unspoken is that the latter state has hidden beneath its vast wealth a quiet epidemic of poverty.

An excerpt:

Take, for example, two countries: Norway and Saudi Arabia. Both of them have huge amounts of sovereign wealth. You could say it’s like they have a machine that creates wealth for them. It’s not a computer, it’s just oil, but that’s okay; it creates surplus. You could say, “In those countries, maybe no-one needs to do anything, because they just have so much money,” but Norway and Saudi Arabia have handled this completely differently.

In Saudi Arabia only a little bit more than 10% of the private-sector workforce is Saudi, and the rest is guest workers. That is a recipe for long-term economic and social problems. In Norway just about everybody works, men and women, much more than most other European countries, but they don’t work that many hours. They have kept themselves relevant, and engaged, and prosperous, and actually pretty happy if you believe the data.

So, there are ways to deal with the challenge of abundance, but it’s not a bad problem to have on the scale of social problems that one could face. That’s what we’re talking about here, it’s the problem of abundance – in other words, abundant productivity, abundance of capability to do things with machines that we used to require human labour and toil for.

There are challenges that come with that. One is the leisure challenge; the other is, of course, some skills become less relevant faster than others. The people who have clearly been affected by the thrust of technological change, over the last 30 years especially, have been low-educated adults whose skills are more closely replaceable by automation, not actually necessary in the lowest-skilled jobs, but many have been displaced from middle-skilled jobs.

If I’m a clerical worker or a production worker and that type of work no longer exists, I can still do table waiting, I can still do security, I can still do cleaning, and actually I’ll probably displace an even less-educated worker who wanted that job. For example, in the US we see very few teenagers anymore working at so-called ‘teen’ jobs; they’re held by adults.

It does create challenges and they are distributional challenges.•

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“The Tasks That Have Proved Most Vexing To Automate Are Those Demanding Flexibility, Judgment, And Common Sense”

September 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The MIT economist David Autor doesn’t believe it’s different this time, he doesn’t think automation will lead to widespread technological unemployment any more than it did during the Industrial Revolution or the last AI scares of the 1960s and 1970s. Autor feels that robots may come for some of our jobs, but there will still be enough old and new ones to busy human hands because our machine brethren will probably never be our equal in common sense, adaptability and creativity. Technology’s new tools may be fueling wealth inequality, he acknowledges, but the fear of AI soon eliminating Labor is unfounded. 

Well, perhaps. But if you’re a truck or bus or taxi or limo or delivery driver, a hotel clerk or bellhop, a lawyer or paralegal, a waiter or fast-casual food preparer, or one of the many other workers whose gigs will probably disappear, you may be in for some serious economic pain before abundance emerges at the other side of the new arrangement.

Autor certainly is right in arguing that the main economic problem caused by mass automation would be “one of distribution, not of scarcity.” But that’s an issue requiring some political consensus to solve, and reaching a majority isn’t easy these days in our polarized society.

From Autor’s smart article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?“:

Polanyi’s Paradox: Will It Be Overcome?

Automation, complemented in recent decades by the exponentially increasing power of information technology, has driven changes in productivity that have disrupted labor markets. This essay has emphasized that jobs are made up of many tasks and that while automation and computerization can substitute for some of them, understanding the interaction between technology and employment requires thinking about more than just substitution. It requires thinking about the range of tasks involved in jobs, and how human labor can often complement new technology. It also requires thinking about price and income elasticities for different kinds of output, and about labor supply responses.

The tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly. I referred to this constraint above as Polanyi’s paradox. In the past decade, computerization and robotics have progressed into spheres of human activity that were considered off limits only a few years earlier—driving vehicles, parsing legal documents, even performing agricultural field labor. Is Polanyi’s paradox soon to be at least mostly overcome, in the sense that the vast majority of tasks will soon be automated?

My reading of the evidence suggests otherwise. Indeed, Polanyi’s paradox helps to explain what has not yet been accomplished, and further illuminates the paths by which more will ultimately be accomplished. Specifically, I see two distinct paths that engineering and computer science can seek to traverse to automate tasks for which we “do not know the rules”: environmental control and machine learning. The first path circumvents Polanyi’s paradox by regularizing the environment, so that comparatively inflexible machines can function semi-autonomously. The second approach inverts Polanyi’s paradox: rather than teach machines rules that we do not understand, engineers develop machines that attempt to infer tacit rules from context, abundant data, and applied statistics.•

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“He Has Begun Worrying About Something That Would Have Been Unimaginable To Him A Few Years Ago”

June 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hod Lipson loves robots, but love is complicated. 

The robotics engineer is among the growing chorus of those concerned about technological unemployment leading to social unrest, something Norbert Wiener warned of more than 60 years ago. Is it, at long last, in this Digital Age, happening?

In a long-form MIT Technology Review article, David Rotman wonders if the new technologies may be contributing to wealth inequality and could ultimately lead to an even a greater divide, while considering the work of analysts on both sides of automation issue, including Sir Tony Atkinson, Martin Ford, Andrew McAfee and David Autor. The opening:

The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering professor at Cornell University (this July he’s moving his lab to Columbia University), is one of the world’s leading experts on artificial intelligence and robotics. His research projects provide a peek into the intriguing possibilities of machines and automation, from robots that “evolve” to ones that assemble themselves out of basic building blocks. (His Cornell colleagues are building robots that can serve as baristas and kitchen help.) A few years ago, Lipson demonstrated an algorithm that explained experimental data by formulating new scientific laws, which were consistent with ones known to be true. He had automated scientific discovery.

Lipson’s vision of the future is one in which machines and software possess abilities that were unthinkable until recently. But he has begun worrying about something else that would have been unimaginable to him a few years ago. Could the rapid advances in automation and digital technology provoke social upheaval by eliminating the livelihoods of many people, even as they produce great wealth for others?

“More and more computer-guided automation is creeping into everything from manufacturing to decision making,” says Lipson. In the last two years alone, he says, the development of so-called deep learning has triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence, and 3-D printing has begun to change industrial production processes. “For a long time the common understanding was that technology was destroying jobs but also creating new and better ones,” says Lipson. “Now the evidence is that technology is destroying jobs and indeed creating new and better ones but also fewer ones. It is something we as technologists need to start thinking about.”•

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“The New Industries And Companies…Will Only Use People To Do The Work If They’re Better At It Than Machines Are”

June 9, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As someone consumed by robotics, automation, the potential for technological unemployment and its societal and political implications, I read as many books as possible on the topic, and I feel certain that The Second Machine Age, the 2014 title coauthored by Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson, is the best of the lot. If you’re just beginning to think about these issues, start right there.

In his Financial Times blog, McAfee, who believes this time is different and that the Second Machine Age won’t resemble the Industrial Age, has published a post about an NPR debate on the subject with MIT economist David Autor, who disagrees. An excerpt: 

Over the next 20-40 years, which was the timeframe I was looking at, I predicted that vehicles would be driving themselves; mines, factories, and farms would be largely automated; and that we’d have an extraordinarily abundance economy that didn’t have anything like the same bottomless thirst for labour that the Industrial Era did.

As expected, I found David’s comments in response to this line of argument illuminating. He said: “If we’d had this conversation 100 years ago I would not have predicted the software industry, the internet, or all the travel or all the experience goods … so I feel it would be rather arrogant of me to say I’ve looked at the future and people won’t come up with stuff … that the ideas are all used up.”

This is exactly right. We are going to see innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity that I can’t even begin to imagine (if I could, I’d be an entrepreneur or venture capitalist myself). But all the new industries and companies that spring up in the coming years will only use people to do the work if they’re better at it than machines are. And the number of areas where that is the case is shrinking — I believe rapidly.•

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“Automation Threatens All Manner Of Workers, From Drivers To Waiters To Nurses”

February 26, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite some instances of revisionist history, Bill Gates knew early on exactly how disruptive the Internet would be, and now he feels the same about Weak AI. And he’s not alone. The question is how quickly technological unemployment will spread. Could more than 30% of all jobs vanish within a decade without new ones to replace them? Or will it be a slower fade to black for the remnants of the Industrial Age? From Timothy Aeppel at the WSJ:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, speaking in Washington last year, said automation threatens all manner of workers, from drivers to waiters to nurses. “I don’t think people have that in their mental model,” he said.

Robot employment

Gartner Inc., the technology research firm, has predicted a third of all jobs will be lost to automation within a decade. And within two decades, economists at Oxford University forecast nearly half of the current jobs will be performed with machine technology. 

“When I was in grad school, you knew if you worried about technology, you were viewed as a dummy—because it always helps people,” MIT economist David Autor said. But rather than killing jobs indiscriminately, Mr. Autor’s research found automation commandeering such middle-class work as clerk and bookkeeper, while creating jobs at the high- and low-end of the market.

This is one reason the labor market has polarized and wages have stagnated over the past 15 years, Mr. Autor said. The concern among economists shouldn’t be machines soon replacing humans, he said: “The real problem I see with automation is that it’s contributed to growing inequality.”•

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“It Can Estimate Pain Levels From Children’s Expressions”

December 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We may be on the doorstep of a miraculous mansion, but who will live there? It could be that the Digital Age, like the Industrial Age before it, creates as many jobs as it replaces, but that’s looking less likely, and society being wealthy in the aggregate without concern for the breakdown of the bounty could become a scary thing. From Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times:

“There are certain human skills machines will probably never replicate, like common sense, adaptability and creativity, said David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. Even jobs that become automated often require human involvement, like doctors on standby to assist the automated anesthesiologist, called Sedasys.

Elsewhere, though, machines are replacing certain jobs. Telemarketers are among those most at risk, according to a recent study by Oxford University professors. They identified recreational therapists as the least endangered — and yet that judgment may prove premature. Already, Microsoft’s Kinect can recognize a person’s movements and correct them while doing exercise or physical therapy. 

Other fields could follow. The inventors of facial recognition software from a University of California, San Diego lab say it can estimate pain levels from children’s expressions and screen people for depression. Machines are even learning to taste: The Thai government in September introduced a robot that determines whether Thai food tastes sufficiently authentic or whether it needs another squirt of fish sauce.

Watson, the computer system built by IBM that beat humans at Jeopardy in 2011, has since learned to do other human tasks. This year, it began advising military veterans on complex life decisions like where to live and which insurance to buy. Watson culls through documents for scientists and lawyers and creates new recipes for chefs. Now IBM is trying to teach Watson emotional intelligence.”

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“Will Automation Take Your Job Away?”

August 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Vox, Matthew Yglesias has a post about labor automation, “Robots Won’t Destroy Jobs, But They Will Destroy The Middle Class,” which focuses on a recent paper by economist David Autor that encourages education as a means of combating further income inequality. Yglesias suggests that wage growth for McJobs will likely lead them to be automated, but that’s happening regardless. That’s why the title of the post seems unlikely to turn out to be true. From Yglesias:

“Will automation take your job away? No, argues economist David Autor in a new paper presented at the Federal Reserve conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on Friday. Instead, it’ll just push you into a menial low-wage job.

That, at least, has been the recent past of technology’s impact on the labor market, Autor suggests. We’ve seen what he calls ‘job polarization’ where automation has increased the demand for highly skilled managers and creative types, plus the demand for low-paid food prep workers and such. …

Autor says this more or less shows the importance of improving education. Someone who might once have been qualified for a pretty good secretarial job is nowadays only going to be qualified for a job at Chipotle, since modern technology reduces the need for secretaries. To save her from the dismal future of a burrito stomping on a human face forever, she needs to be trained up to the level where she can get a job as an app developer or devising burrito marketing campaigns.

The other view, which Autor doesn’t really mention, is that perhaps a strong labor movement could turn burrito-rolling into a highly paid job. The most likely answer, I think, is that to the extent you try to transform low-wage work into middle-wage work you simply encourage those newly middle class jobs to be automated.”

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