Hexapodia XLIX: We Cannot Tell in Advance Which Technologies Are Labor-Augmenting & Which Are Labor-Replacing

Key Insights:

1. Brad’s microphone is dying, and a new one is on order.

2. However, 75% of the talking on this episode is Noah: he came loaded for bear.

3. Although Noah has not yet read Acemoglu & Johnson’s Power & Progress, he nevertheless has OPINIONS!

4. Friedrich von Hayek was right when he pointed out that we could not know the shape of future technologies

5. Particularly, we cannot know where, as new technologies develop, they will settle in the balance between tacit-local and formal-generalizable-centralizable knowledge with respect to what is needed to make them actually work.

6. Thus the ex ante error rate in figuring out in advance whether a branch of knowledge is labor-augmenting or labor-replacing is high.

7. Better not to try to channel R&D in labor-augmenting directions: we have powerful, well-known, useful, and reliable tools for improving equity: use them rather than trying to guide future technologies in a labor-augmenting equality-promoting direction.

8. Noah will read Power & Progress before mid-August.

9. Brad will try to come up with examples of technologies other than the power loom that we wish had been adopted more slowly.

10. Hexapodia!

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References:

• Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson: Power & Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity <https://www.amazon.com//dp/B0BD4DV59F>

• Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo: “The Race Between Machine & Man: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares & Employment” <https://www.nber.org/papers/w22252>

• Daisuke Adachi, Daiji Kawaguchi, & Yukiko Saito: Robots and Employment: Evidence from Japan, 1978-2017 <https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/etidpaper/20051.htm>

• Jay Dixon, Bryan Hong, & Lynn Wu: The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms

• Karen Eggleston, Yong Suk Lee, & Toshiaki Iizuka: Robots and Labor in the Service Sector: Evidence from Nursing Homes

• Katja Mann & Lukas Püttmann: Benign Effects of Automation: New Evidence from Patent Texts <https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2959584>

• Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens: The zombie robot argument lurches on: There is no evidence that automation leads to joblessness or inequality

  <https://www.epi.org/publication/the-zombie-robot-argument-lurches-on-there-is-no-evidence-that-automation-leads-to-joblessness-or-inequality/>

• Arjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang: “Why transformative artificial intelligence is really, really hard to achieve” <https://thegradient.pub/why-transformative-artificial-intelligence-is-really-really-hard-to-achieve/>

• Noah Smith: American workers need lots and lots of robots: With the power of automation, our workers can win. Without it, they're in trouble

• Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte: The fear of technology-driven unemployment and its empirical base <https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/fear-technology-driven-unemployment-and-its-empirical-base>

• Melline Somers, Angelos Theodorakopoulos, & Kerstin Hötte: Technology and jobs: A systematic literature review <https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/technology-and-jobs-a-systematic-literature-review/>

+, of course:

• Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>