IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-18-00857.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Re-thinking the capabilities of technology in economics

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Susskind

    (Fellow in Economics, Balliol College, Oxford University)

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, the ‘task-based' approach has become dominant in the economic literature that explores the effects of technological change on the labour market. This approach has tended to rely on a particular understanding of the capabilities of technology -- known as the ‘ALM hypothesis'. However, this has led this literature to severely underestimate these capabilities. Many tasks that were believed to be out of reach of automation can now be automated. In this note I set out two distinct explanations for why these capabilities were underestimated -- one that is explored in the recent literature and maintains the ALM hypothesis, and a new explanation that challenges it. I propose a new hypothesis about the capabilities of technology that contains the ALM hypothesis as a special case.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Susskind, 2019. "Re-thinking the capabilities of technology in economics," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 39(1), pages 280-288.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-18-00857
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2019/Volume39/EB-19-V39-I1-P30.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo, 2018. "The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(6), pages 1488-1542, June.
    2. Colin Caines & Florian Hoffmann & Gueorgui Kambourov, 2017. "Complex-Task Biased Technological Change and the Labor Market," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 25, pages 298-319, April.
    3. Autor, David H., 2013. "The "task approach" to labor markets : an overview," Journal for Labour Market Research, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany], vol. 46(3), pages 185-199.
    4. David H. Autor & Lawrence F. Katz & Melissa S. Kearney, 2008. "Trends in U.S. Wage Inequality: Revising the Revisionists," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 90(2), pages 300-323, May.
    5. David H. Autor & Frank Levy & Richard J. Murnane, 2003. "The skill content of recent technological change: an empirical exploration," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue Nov.
    6. David J. Deming, 2017. "The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(4), pages 1593-1640.
    7. Andre Esteva & Brett Kuprel & Roberto A. Novoa & Justin Ko & Susan M. Swetter & Helen M. Blau & Sebastian Thrun, 2017. "Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks," Nature, Nature, vol. 542(7639), pages 115-118, February.
    8. Maarten Goos & Alan Manning, 2007. "Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 89(1), pages 118-133, February.
    9. Erik Brynjolfsson & Tom Mitchell & Daniel Rock, 2018. "What Can Machines Learn, and What Does It Mean for Occupations and the Economy?," AEA Papers and Proceedings, American Economic Association, vol. 108, pages 43-47, May.
    10. Frey, Carl Benedikt & Osborne, Michael A., 2017. "The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 254-280.
    11. David H. Autor, 2015. "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 29(3), pages 3-30, Summer.
    12. Maarten Goos & Alan Manning & Anna Salomons, 2014. "Explaining Job Polarization: Routine-Biased Technological Change and Offshoring," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(8), pages 2509-2526, August.
    13. Berg, Andrew & Buffie, Edward F. & Zanna, Luis-Felipe, 2018. "Should we fear the robot revolution? (The correct answer is yes)," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 117-148.
    14. David Autor, 2014. "Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth," NBER Working Papers 20485, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Paula Prenzel & Simona Iammarino, 2021. "Labor Force Aging and the Composition of Regional Human Capital," Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 97(2), pages 140-163, March.
    2. Alonso, Cristian & Berg, Andrew & Kothari, Siddharth & Papageorgiou, Chris & Rehman, Sidra, 2022. "Will the AI revolution cause a great divergence?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 18-37.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zilian, Laura S. & Zilian, Stella S. & Jäger, Georg, 2021. "Labour market polarisation revisited: evidence from Austrian vacancy data," Journal for Labour Market Research, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany], vol. 55, pages 1-7.
    2. Consoli, Davide & Marin, Giovanni & Rentocchini, Francesco & Vona, Francesco, 2023. "Routinization, within-occupation task changes and long-run employment dynamics," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(1).
    3. Gregory, Terry & Salomons, Anna & Zierahn, Ulrich, 2016. "Racing With or Against the Machine? Evidence from Europe," VfS Annual Conference 2016 (Augsburg): Demographic Change 145843, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    4. Oussama Chemlal & Wafaa Benomar, 2024. "The Technological Impact on Employment in Spain between 2023 and 2035," Forecasting, MDPI, vol. 6(2), pages 1-30, April.
    5. David J. Deming, 2017. "The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 132(4), pages 1593-1640.
    6. Thomsen, Stephan L, 2018. "Die Rolle der Computerisierung und Digitalisierung für Beschäftigung und Einkommen," Hannover Economic Papers (HEP) dp-645, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät.
    7. Jasmine Mondolo, 2022. "The composite link between technological change and employment: A survey of the literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 1027-1068, September.
    8. Arntz, Melanie & Gregory, Terry & Zierahn, Ulrich, 2016. "ELS issues in robotics and steps to consider them. Part 1: Robotics and employment. Consequences of robotics and technological change for the structure and level of employment," ZEW Expertises, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, number 146501.
    9. Zhang, Xinchun & Sun, Murong & Liu, Jianxu & Xu, Aijia, 2024. "The nexus between industrial robot and employment in China: The effects of technology substitution and technology creation," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 202(C).
    10. Falck, Oliver & Heimisch-Roecker, Alexandra & Wiederhold, Simon, 2021. "Returns to ICT skills," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(7).
    11. Bertin Martens & Songul Tolan, 2018. "Will this time be different? A review of the literature on the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Employment, Incomes and Growth," JRC Working Papers on Digital Economy 2018-08, Joint Research Centre.
    12. Albanesi, Stefania & Dias da Silva, Antonio & Jimeno, Juan Francisco & Lamo, Ana & Wabitsch, Alena, 2023. "New Technologies and Jobs in Europe," CEPR Discussion Papers 18220, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    13. Maarten Goos & Melanie Arntz & Ulrich Zierahn & Terry Gregory & Stephanie Carretero Gomez & Ignacio Gonzalez Vazquez & Koen Jonkers, 2019. "The Impact of Technological Innovation on the Future of Work," JRC Working Papers on Labour, Education and Technology 2019-03, Joint Research Centre.
    14. Cirillo, Valeria & Evangelista, Rinaldo & Guarascio, Dario & Sostero, Matteo, 2021. "Digitalization, routineness and employment: An exploration on Italian task-based data," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(7).
    15. Aepli, Manuel, 2019. "Technological change and occupation mobility: A task-based approach to horizontal mismatch," GLO Discussion Paper Series 361, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    16. Hensvik, Lena & Skans, Oskar Nordström, 2023. "The skill-specific impact of past and projected occupational decline," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    17. Songul Tolan & Annarosa Pesole & Fernando Martinez-Plumed & Enrique Fernandez-Macias & José Hernandez-Orallo & Emilia Gomez, 2020. "Measuring the Occupational Impact of AI: Tasks, Cognitive Abilities and AI Benchmarks," JRC Working Papers on Labour, Education and Technology 2020-02, Joint Research Centre.
    18. Brad Hershbein & Lisa B. Kahn, 2018. "Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence from Vacancy Postings," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(7), pages 1737-1772, July.
    19. Naude, Wim, 2019. "The race against the robots and the fallacy of the giant cheesecake: Immediate and imagined impacts of artificial intelligence," MERIT Working Papers 2019-005, United Nations University - Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT).
    20. Georg Graetz, 2019. "Labor Demand in the Past, Present, and Future," European Economy - Discussion Papers 114, Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Technological Change; Automation; Tasks.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J2 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor
    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-18-00857. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.