Productivity

From 2005 to 2016, economists Jon Chung and Yong Suk Lee found that, while robots initially led to lower employment and wages for affected workers, that trend reversed as firms and workers adjusted to the broader adoption of robots in production.

Defending Digital Series, No. 15: While ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence have great potential, predictions of ever-increasing digital disruption thus far have proven to be false. Looking ahead, the most significant societal shifts won’t be driven by digital technology; they will stem from the demands of the physical world.

Over the last two years, the U.S. economy has added 830,000 manufacturing jobs. At first glance, this suggests a renewed strength in manufacturing. In reality, it masks a new weakness: productivity decline.

U.S. manufacturing labor productivity (measured in output per hour of labor) increased 43 percent between 2001 and 2011. However, over the next ten years, productivity fell by 2.8 percent.

A recent paper by Daron Acemoglu and coauthors finds that firms that adopted at least one of five advanced technologies had labor productivity rates 11.4 percent higher than those of non-adopting firms when accounting for industry, firm size, and firm age. This figure increases to 21.2 percent for firms adopting all five technologies.

For many years Korea had the honor of leading the world in industrial robot adoption. But that lead is now in doubt, as other nations, especially China, but also Japan and the United States, saw much faster increases in robot adoption in 2021, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

It’s been nine years since Oxford professors Frey and Osborne’s dystopian forecast came out, so it’s worth looking at what happened to U.S. jobs with the increase of new technologies.

Watch the Center for Data Innovation's panel discussion about the potential for AI-enabled robo-lawyers to provide legal services, the challenges in providing these services today, and steps policymakers can take to allow the development of tech-enabled legal services.

Industrial robot concentration is especially high in Michigan, where 39.5 percent of manufacturing employees had exposure to them in 2019.

“Defending Digital” Series, No. 7: Remember all those breathless warnings that artificial intelligence would soon eliminate a wide range of “routine” jobs? So far, pretty much the opposite has occurred. Given today’s widespread worker shortages, corrosive inflation, and vast societal challenges, America clearly needs all the automation it can get.