The Challenge Is Always a Challenge for Our Imagination

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

At the turn of the 20th century, something like 38% of all U.S. employment was in agriculture. A hundred years later, 2% of all employment is in agriculture. We have gotten good at things that we thought were exclusively human, right? That we turned out how to automate them. So we're at a period where all of a sudden we see the frontier advancing very quickly but we don't know what is going to replace it.

David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of work and the role that automation and smart machines might play in the workforce. Autor stresses the importance of Michael Polanyi's insight that many of the things we know and understand cannot be easily written down or communicated. Those kinds of tacit knowledge will be difficult for smart machines to access and use. In addition, Autor argues that fundamentally, the gains from machine productivity will accrue to humans. The conversation closes with a discussion of the distributional implications of a world with a vastly larger role for smart machines.