Recent quotes:

Has David Autor Gotten Himself Hopelessly Confused with Respect to Average and Marginal Products?: Focus - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Something has bothered me ever since I read the highly-eminent and highly-esteemed David Autor’s “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth”: David Autor (2014): Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth: “[The] human tasks that have proved most amenable to computerization… …are those that follow explicit, codifiable procedures…. Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand… skills that we understand only tacitly…. The interplay between machine and human comparative advantage allows computers to substitute for workers in performing routine, codifiable tasks while amplifying the comparative advantage of workers in supplying problem solving skills, adaptability, and creativity. Understanding this interplay is central to interpreting and forecasting the changing structure of employment in the U.S. and other industrialized countries…. As the price of computing power has fallen, computers have increasingly displaced workers in… middle-skilled cognitive and manual activities, such as bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production…. But the scope for substitution is bounded…. There are many tasks that we understand tacitly and accomplish effortlessly for which we do not know the explicit “rules” or procedures… break an egg over the edge of a mixing bowl, identify a distinct species of birds based only on a fleeting glimpse, write a persuasive paragraph, or develop a hypothesis to explain a poorly understood phenomenon….
#David-Autor #Michael-Polanyi #Information-Age #Robots - equitablegrowth.org