Free exchange
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: March 07, 2013
Mar 2nd 2013 |From the print edition
Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers.
WATSON, an IBM supercomputer, spectacularly beat its human rivals in a 2011 edition of "Jeopardy!", an American quiz show. It has got smarter since then. Its components have shrunk from room-size to briefcase-size; its processing speed has more than tripled. 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.
In a 2011 e-book called "Race against the Machine", Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) worried that human workers would fail to adapt to the quickening pace of technological change. "The Lights in the Tunnel", a 2009 book by Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur, painted a bleaker picture still. Mr Ford noted that about 40% of Americans work in old-fashioned occupations—as nurses, book-keepers and the like. He argued that innovation will soon allow firms to eliminate millions of jobs, like the 3m-plus cashiers whose positions are threatened by automated cash registers, but will create few new opportunities for displaced workers.
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.
Mr Autor describes an alternative approach in which production is modelled as a series of tasks. 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.
As technology improves, Mr Autor writes, a pattern emerges. Machines take over routine tasks like repeated number-crunching or the welding of car parts. Such jobs can be programmed into machines using detailed, specific instructions. Displaced human workers are then reassigned to do more improvisational or intuitive work. At airline check-in counters, say, computers are displacing employees from mundane tasks like printing boarding passes. That makes it easier for the humans to respond to unexpected problems like cancelled flights or changed itineraries.
Machines serve as both a substitute for, and a complement to, labour in other industries. Watson is initially assisting doctors to make cancer-treatment decisions, by providing options along with the associated degrees of confidence; it may eventually replace doctors in some diagnostic work. In other cases, robots may raise demand for doctors' services. A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association notes that though robotically assisted surgeries do not necessarily bring better results than minimally invasive human-only surgeries, it is much easier for doctors to learn and master robotically assisted techniques. Robot-aided surgery could therefore make some procedures cheaper and more widely available.
Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example, computerisation and automation have displaced "middle-skilled" workers at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has increased. This "hollowing out" is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note. Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans, like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation's insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass unemployment. Quite the opposite.
The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they choose how to deploy new technologies.
The road to HAL
The incentives facing firms may also be changing, according to Daron Acemoglu of MIT, Gino Gancia of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional in Barcelona and Fabrizio Zilibotti of the University of Zurich. They reckon that rich-world firms reacted to globalisation by using cheap labour abroad and investing in technologies that helped skilled workers at home. Apple, for example, has used skilled American engineers to design its products and low-cost foreign workers to make them.
Rising wages in emerging markets are now making it less attractive to send unskilled work abroad. The authors suggest this could mean a sharp change in the influence of innovation on labour markets. Firms may find it more attractive to invest in technologies that boost the productivity of less-skilled domestic labour, pushing up their wages. One day, clever robots may change this. But as long as humans retain the edge on cognitive flexibility, firms will keep putting willing workers to good use.
Sources
"Race Against the Machine: How the digital revolution is accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the economy", Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Digital Frontier Press, 2011
"The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, accelerating technology, and the economy of the future", Martin Ford, 2009
"The 'Task Approach' to Labor Markets: An overview", David Autor, NBER Working Paper 18711, January 2013
"Technical Change and the Relative Demand for Skilled Labor: The United States in historical perspective", Lawrence Katz and Robert Margo, NBER Working Paper 18752, February 2013
"Offshoring and Directed Technical Change", Daron Acemoglu, Gino Gancia, and Fabrizio Zilibotti, NBER Working Paper 18585, December 2012
Economist.com/blogs/freeexchange
From the print edition: Finance and economics
研究：機器人並不會使勞工失業
2013-03-07 Web only 作者：經濟學人
IBM的超級電腦Watson於2011年在美國益智節目中擊敗了人類，現在它的體積更從和房間一樣大，縮到只有手提箱大小，運算速度也增加超過三倍；更輕更快的Watson現在亦有商業應用，它的第一項應用就是在癌症門診提供醫療建議。
許多人擔心，Watson會讓機器取代人類勞工的趨勢更加快速；但許多研究顯示，革新不一定會讓人類勞動力的角色縮小。專家指出，經濟學將勞力和資本視做兩項不同的元素，但在真實世界之中，兩者之間的界線其實相當模糊。
另一個描述生產的方式，就是將生產視為一連串任務，而企業的挑戰即在於，依照資本和勞動力各自的相對優勢來分配這些任務。革新可能會讓人類失去某些工作，但也可以讓人類在其他工作上更具生產力。
機器既是勞力的替代品，同時也與勞力相輔相成。而從歷史來看，科技進步對勞工來說其實相對有利。
過去，機器取代的是例行性工作，但許多人擔心接下來機器可能會取代非例行性工作。但專家指出，某些技能工作可以自動化，但不代表這些工作就會自動化，例如製造一台Nissan汽車，在日本和印度所需要的勞工人數就差異極大。
新興市場工資上升，將非技能工作送至國外的吸引力也逐漸下滑，未來，企業可能會發現，投資於科技、提升國內勞工的生產力反而比較吸引人。更聰明的機器人或許會再次帶來改變，但只要人類仍舊擁有認知能力極具彈性這項優勢，企業就會繼續想辦法找出適合人類的工作。（黃維德譯）
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