The Industrial Revolution and the Middle Skill

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Prior to the industrial revolution, there was a lot of artisans who did all the steps in making a product. Otter says that at first the factory jobs that displaced the artisans required less skill and paid less. But then machines got more complex and so did the things they could make. And so factory owners started to need workers with more skills.

For the last four decades, technology has been mostly a force for greater inequality and a shrinking middle class. But new empirical evidence suggests that the age of AI could be different. We speak to MIT's David Autor, one of the greatest labor economists in the world, who envisions a future where we use AI to make a wider array of workers much better at a whole range of jobs and help rebuild the middle class.

This episode was produced by Dave Blanchard and edited by Molly Messick. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Katherine Silva. Jess Jiang is Planet Money's acting executive producer.

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