In this episode of Justified Posteriors, we examine the paper "Demographics and Automation" by economists Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo. The central hypothesis of this paper is that aging societies, facing a scarcity of middle-aged labor for physical production tasks, are more likely to invest in industrial automation.
Going in, we were split. One of us thought the idea made basic economic sense, while the other was skeptical, worrying that a vague trend of "modernity" might be the real force causing both aging populations and a rise in automation. The paper threw a mountain of data at the problem, from international robot counts to US patent filings. Listen to find out how we updated our priors!
Timestamps:
(01:45) The Central Question
(04:10) Stating the Priors
(10:45) Looking to the Future.
(22:30) What is a Robot, Anyway?.
(25:20) Reading the Footnotes.
(30:45) The Most Compelling Evidence.
(42:00) The Mechanism at Work.
(52:20) The Final Verdict (Backward-Looking).
(57:30) The Future of Automation & AI.
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