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Here’s a current example of the challenge we face... At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When…
The … truck driver is processing a constant stream of [visual, aural, and tactile] information from his environment. … To program this behavior we could begin with a video camera and other sensors to capture the sensory input. But executing a left turn against oncoming traffic involves so many factors that it is hard…
The way Watson plays the game also requires massive amounts of pattern matching. The supercomputer has been loaded with hundreds of millions of unconnected digital documents, including encyclopedias and other reference works, newspaper stories, and the Bible. When it receives a question, it immediately goes to work to…
In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000. … “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at…
During the Great Recession, nearly 1 in 12 people working in sales in America lost their job, accelerating a trend that had begun long before. In 1995, for example, 2.08 people were employed in “sales and related” occupations for every $1 million of real GDP generated that year. By 2002 (the last year for which…
And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses. Apparent exceptions here only prove the rule. A prankster used an online generator of abstracts for computer science papers…
We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can…
...the relative demand for skilled labor is closely correlated with advances in technology, particularly digital technologies. Hence, the moniker “skill-biased technical change,” or SBTC. There are two distinct components to recent SBTC. Technologies like robotics, numerically controlled machines, computerized…
Finally, it’s easy to see how a shift in income from labor to capital would lead to a similar reduction in overall demand. Capitalists tend to save more of each marginal dollar than laborers. In the short run, a transfer from laborers to capitalists reduces total consumption, and thus total GDP. This phenomenon is…
As we look ahead, we see these three trends not only accelerating but also evolving. For instance, new research by David Autor and David Dorn has put an interesting twist on the SBTC story. They find that the relationship between skills and wages has recently become U-shaped. In the most recent decade, demand has…
There was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they…