😲 What the economist who identified the 'China Trade Shock' says about a possible AI Shock
Also: 5 Quick Questions for … computer scientist Niko Grupen on the future of machine learning
In This Issue
The Essay: What the economist who identified the “China Trade Shock" says about a possible AI Shock
5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … computer scientist Niko Grupen on the future of machine learning
Micro Reads: recession watch, a pro-build liberalism, a robot boom, and more …
Quote of the Issue
“Yet not many of those alive in 1800 recognized the degree to which their world was changing. ‘I am astonished,’ the American steamboat inventor James Rumsey wrote George Washington in 1785, ‘that it is so hard to force an advantage on the public.’ The future is a hard sell.” - Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History
The Essay
😲 What the economist who identified the “China Trade Shock" says about a possible AI Shock
There’s nothing new or surprising about the notion that technology affects the nature of work. A machine can make a worker more productive, whether that clever device is a backhoe or a spreadsheet. Technology can be labor augmenting. But it can also be labor automating. It can replace aspects of a job or even an entire job, as happened with telephone switchboard operators mid-20th century. Yet there have always been more and more things for humans to do. Technology often creates new bits for existing jobs or entirely new jobs. Faster, please, right?
But is there something economically special about artificial intelligence and its impact on jobs and wages — especially if it widely and effectively spreads throughout the 2020s American economy? That’s the issue tackled in the new NBER working paper “The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty,” a new paper by MIT economist David Autor. He’s probably best known among the general public for his work on the “China Trade Shock” — how U.S. communities that produced goods competing with Chinese exports, especially furniture and textiles, suffered long-lasting economic pain and social disruption.
So will there be an AI Shock? Autor frames the question in a way that’s a bit more scholarly, if not subdued, than I do: “Does AI fundamentally change the relationship between technological change, labor demand, and inequality—and if so, how do we characterize these changes analytically?” It’s an especially important question if AI optimists such as myself are correct.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Faster, Please! to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.