James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, and Robert Seamans
A new survey of AI startups offers insight into AI’s impact on jobs and the economy, including data suggesting a competitive market for startups and the use of AI to enhance rather than replace human labor.
James Bessen quoted in PBS NewsHour, Nov. 16, 2018.
James Bessen debates on AI. Read more ->
David Autor and Anna Salomons
While many technological innovations replace workers with machines, what effect does that have on overall employment and productivity? This paper explores automation’s impact on total employment and aggregate demand.
James Bessen
Will industries use new information technologies to eliminate jobs? Sometimes productivity-enhancing technology increases industry employment instead. In manufacturing, jobs grew along with productivity for a century or more; only later did productivity gains bring declining employment. What changed? Markets became saturated.
Research Summary: Why Isn’t Automation Creating Unemployment?
James Bessen
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will automate many jobs, but the effect on employment is not obvious. Although technology has sharply reduced jobs in manufacturing in recent decades, for over a century before that, employment grew, even in industries experiencing rapid technological change. This paper presents a simple model of the change in demand that accurately predicts the rise and fall of employment in the textile, steel and automotive industries, and will be useful for exploring how AI is likely to affect jobs over the next 10 or 20 years.
James Bessen at Monktoberfest on the effects of automation on employment.
Ian Hathaway with Mark Muro. Latest available data for 2015 show that employment in ride-sharing is accelerating. Read more
By James Bessen