For Clues About How A.I. Will Change Work, Look to the Past

In December 1931, economists gathered in Washington to discuss the threat that technology posed to American workers.Switchboard operators were being rendered obsolete by the dial telephone.Movie-theater musicians were superfluous in the age of “talkies.” Teamsters — men driving teams of horses — were losing their jobs to drivers of gasoline-powered trucks.Such disruptions were nothing new, the economists conceded.

But with the Great Depression raging, the risks to the economy and social stability seemed greater than ever.And it was all happening “more rapidly than in any previous age,” warned Sumner H.

Slichter, a Harvard economist.“And yet we have failed, for the most part, to recognize that change presents a major social problem,” he told colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association.Nearly a century later, a new generation of economists is trying to make sense of the consequences of another technology: artificial intelligence.And while the jobs they are focused on are different — computer programmers instead of telephone operators, scriptwriters instead of movie musicians, drivers of trucks powered by diesel, not animals — many of the questions they are asking are the same.Would the undeniable benefits of technology be enjoyed broadly, or accrue only to the wealthy few? Would new jobs emerge in time to replace the ones being destroyed? Was government data up to the task of measuring the rapidly changing economy? And, most importantly, what could the government do to slow these disruptions, or at least to help the workers caught in their wake?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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