Productivity

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.

While U.S. labor is currently more productive than Canadian labor, it is losing ground both in terms of pure productivity and price competitiveness.

The digital economy accounted for 9.6 percent of US GDP in 2019, or $2.05 trillion.

As technology such as Positive Train Control systems has improved, and further advances in autonomous systems look promising, freight rail companies would like the flexibility of operating trains with less than two operators, not so they can raise profits, but so they can reduce prices to better compete with the trucking sector.

Managers found that company productivity improved under a companywide teleworking policy, with the strongest ratings on productivity improvement made from managers of firms in “hybrid” models, where workers share time between the home and office.

Time-lag implementation in the regression also showed a delay of three years between the point of AI adoption and return on productivity growth, indicating an investment delay for AI that could also explain previous literature gaps.