Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here? (2017) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
6 Findings and a Path Forward
6 Findings and a Path Forward
Pages 137-157
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From page 137... ...
At the same time, productivity growth has slowed, a fact often read as an indication of decreased technological progress. However, the committee's judgment is that the productivity data are not necessarily inconsistent with a period of significant technical change, because they measure somewhat different concepts and because there are important lags associated with adoption, co-invention, changes in organization, and the updating of skills that are typically required to translate technical change into economic value.
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From page 138... ...
Increasingly, we will see robots used to automate more complex physical tasks in manufacturing, transportation, retailing, and many other industries, and AI to automate knowledge-based tasks. Because most jobs involve multiple subtasks, and because technology typically targets specific tasks, one common impact of technology is to shift the distribution of tasks the human worker performs in a job (e.g., authors today spend less time proofreading for incorrect spelling, enabling them to spend more time on the content of what they are writing)
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From page 139... ...
Although current digital platforms for ondemand work directly involve less than 1 percent of the workforce, they display significant growth potential. Many employers are increasingly viewing their relationship with employees as a short-term commitment rather than a lifelong investment.
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From page 140... ...
5. As IT continues to complement or substitute for many work tasks, workers will require skills that increasingly emphasize creativity, adaptability, and interpersonal skills over routine information processing and manual tasks.
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From page 141... ...
additional administrative data from federal and state sources would provide new opportunities for economic research. In March of 2016, the federal government passed a law to establish the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking; this group is likely to address some of these challenges and may facilitate enhanced data access for the research community.2 The interplay between technology and work is complex and changing, and important public policy issues are already arising.
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From page 142... ...
RESEARCH PATHWAYS While it is not within this committee's charge to recommend specific policy actions, it is within its purview to advocate for well-informed policy discussions about how IT is affecting the workforce, including job opportunities and workers' quality of life. The committee believes that the foundational knowledge and insights essential to an informed policy debate can best be attained through a strategic research program to better track the changes that are occurring and to understand the mechanisms by which advances in technology influence our economy, workforce, and society.
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From page 143... ...
National Science Foundation's "Big Ideas" for investigation, "work at the human-technology frontier," announced in 2016.3 Theme 1: Evaluating and Tracking Technological Progress While many researchers or individuals who follow technology trends may have a strong understanding of current technological capabilities, a uniform strategy is currently lacking for tracking new developments across a broad range of technology fields, their capacity for automating or augmenting human work functions, and the degree to which they are diffusing into industry and firms. More rigorous measures and awareness of the state of the art of technology would help to signal the potential for corresponding workforce impacts.
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From page 144... ...
, data storage costs and speeds, communication speed, saturation of high-speed Internet coverage across the United States, progress on specific technologies such as speech recognition and computer vision using standard benchmarks (e.g., the ImageNet benchmark for testing computer-vision algorithms and the COCO benchmark for image captioning)
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From page 145... ...
In addition, a forward-looking panel of technical experts could be created to forecast technological progress and its impacts, analogous to groups of expert economists who attempt to forecast the economy. These forward-looking subjective forecasts can be combined with data from the above quantitative indexes to form a broad view of the state and future direction of technology and its impacts.
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From page 146... ...
mitigate technological unemployment, (2) ease transitions for workers forced to change occupational fields due to technological change, and (3)
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• What is the inventory of policies attempted across different countries and throughout history regarding continuing education, workforce benefits, social safety nets, and other relevant issues? • What data exist regarding the impact of past policies adopted in different contexts?
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• What impact do different technologies have on the functioning of teams? For instance, are there discernible differences between those physically augmenting human actions, such as robotic arms, versus those providing data or making decisions?
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From page 149... ...
Furthermore, there is a good likelihood that already disadvantaged groups will bear the brunt of the costs of automation.9 Research examining changing labor and skills demands in specific industries and occupational fields over time, along 9 In addition, there is some evidence that the rise in disability rolls may, in part, reflect a lack of employment prospects for some groups. The extent to which automation of jobs contributes to this is an open question.
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From page 150... ...
This research should examine existing trends in both authoritative economic statistics and emerging data sources and methods, identify correlations to changes in technological capabilities and diffusion in different fields, and hypothesize and test causal relationships using results from research about organizational practices. Key research questions include the following: • What types of worker skills and traits are currently becoming more or less valuable in specific sectors of the labor market?
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From page 151... ...
For example, workers in France accrue a credit of 20 hours of paid time for continuing education for each year they work.10 What would be the expected impact if the United States were to adopt similar policies? Additional questions include the following: • What are the factors contributing to gaps in educational attainment, and is the United States on a trajectory to narrow or widen current gaps in educational attainment?
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From page 152... ...
Through this work, the potential for on-demand jobs to effectively provide or augment employment for nemployed or low-income workers, as well as other associated advanu tages and disadvantages, should be elucidated. Key research questions include the following: • To what extent do current measures of business dynamism capture activity in the on-demand economy?
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From page 153... ...
Research in this area could aim to elucidate the role of technology in shifting where and how work is conducted and lay the groundwork for anticipating future changes and opportunities. Key research questions include the following: • How might new technologies continue to change the costs and benefits of telecommuting, globalization, or other aspects of the geography of work?
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From page 154... ...
Updating and Augmenting Authoritative Data Sources As discussed in Chapter 5, much useful quantitative data comes from government sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
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From page 155... ...
Key research questions include the following: • How might the classification of job types, categories, and characteristics be standardized to enable identification and longitudinal tracking of changes due to technology-related trends? • To what extent are human attributes -- including creativity, empathy, interpersonal skills, leadership, mentoring, and physical presence -- currently valued in the U.S.
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From page 156... ...
More generally, many believe that the future of economic statistics lies in the integration of survey, administrative, and commercial data,13 and the use of federal administrative data was named a priority of the executive branch for fiscal year 2016.14 Such integration is expected to revolutionize key national indicators and also allow much more timely and granular tracking of economic data by detailed geography, industry, occupational fields, worker characteristics, and other classifiers. Academia can play a critical role as honest brokers between the public and private sectors with respect to these data sets.
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From page 157... ...
These could build on the newly created Federal Research Data Centers -- which now house data from the Census Bureau, BLS, the National Center for Health Statistics, and the National Center for Education Statistics, with plans to add data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Economic Analysis -- and could potentially bring private-sector sources into the mix from willing partners. The new national Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking may reflect efforts in this direction.15 Such efforts may be frustrated by existing and potentially outdated government regulations that constrain the ability of government to share certain data sets with researchers.
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