Technology has long been a double-edged sword when it comes to employment, with advancements leading to both job losses and creations. A comprehensive study by MIT economist David Autor and his team has shed new light on the impact of technology on the American labor force since 1940. Their findings reveal that since the 1980s, technology has tended to replace more jobs than it has added, altering the employment landscape in ways previously unquantified. The meticulous study, anchored in an analysis of 35,000 U.S. Census job categories and a century's worth of patent data, offers an unprecedented view into how jobs have evolved due to technological intervention.
The research, detailed in a paper titled "New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, aims to meticulously track how occupations have disappeared or emerged over the decades. The study has managed to, for the first time, quantify both job losses and gains tied to technological advances, effectively mapping the ongoing tug-of-war between "automation" and "augmentation" —the processes by which technology either replaces or creates jobs, respectively. As reported by MIT News, Autor says, "There does appear to be a faster rate of automation, and a slower rate of augmentation, in the last four decades, from 1980 to the present, than in the four decades prior."
Notably, the study underscores that about 60 percent of current U.S. jobs represent new types of employment that have been created since 1940, evolving societal needs and technological capabilities. For example, a century ago, a computer programmer might have been plowing fields on a farm. Using natural language processing to analyze U.S. patent text, Autor and colleagues dissected how words and concepts are associated with job categories to determine technology's influence on the employment spectrum. The research sheds light on nuanced changes within industries where automation and augmentation often co-exist, reshaping professions simultaneously.
The trends observed over the past 40 years highlight not only a shift in job types but also a widening wage gap, with a tendency for newly created high-paying and lower-income jobs to gravitate towards individuals with higher education levels. Autor told MIT News, "The new work is bifurcated. As old work has been erased in the middle, new work has grown on either side." These findings are pivotal in understanding long-term implications of technological advancements, as society stands on the cusp of further changes driven by AI and other emerging technologies.
While the study from Autor's team represents a groundbreaking stride in measuring technology's tangible effects on labor, they recognize that there is room to further refine their research methods. They hope their approach will enable better understanding of technology's impact on the workforce, particularly as AI begins to assert its influence. Autor concludes, "We’re hoping our research approach gives us the ability to say more about that going forward." This research was partially supported by grants from several foundations, including The Carnegie Corporation and Google. The implications of these findings are considerable, casting a new light on how technological progress affects job creation and the evolution of work itself.
