Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work (2025) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 101-110
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From page 101... ...
Absent that educational foundation, it is unlikely that the United States would have reaped the same rapid, broadly shared income growth in the ensuing decades.42 DEMAND FOR EXPERTISE IN THE COMPUTER ERA BEFORE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Stemming from the innovations pioneered during World War II, the computer era reshaped this mass expertise trajectory. Like other general-purpose technologies that preceded it (e.g., electricity, the steam engine)
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From page 102... ...
But it was a mixed blessing for many workers because, in many instances, computers proved more proficient and far less expensive than workers in mastering tools and following rules. In the precomputer era, workers who specialized in skilled office and production tasks were the embodiment of the "mass expertise" of the industrial era.
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From page 103... ...
The wage consequences of routine task displacement were stark. Workers whose industries and occupations were most exposed to the automation of routine tasks saw sharp falls in their real earnings from 1980 forward, as shown in Panel A of Figure 4-4.
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From page 105... ...
In the era of mass production, the advancing high school movement dovetailed with the skill demands of the industrializing economy, so the supply of high school–educated workers kept pace with the rapidly rising demand. To use the terminology of Goldin and Katz, in the "race between education and technology" in the early decades of the 20th century, education decidedly won that heat.51 But there was no corresponding college movement on the scale of the high school movement to meet the rising demands for elite expertise in the computer era.
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From page 106... ...
As the value of expert nonroutine tasks rose, workers with graduate degrees ("elite expertise") were the biggest beneficiaries.
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From page 107... ...
This chapter discusses its impli cations for the operation of the labor markets -- specifically, its potential impact on the demand for expertise. These potential impacts stem from one attribute that AI possesses and previous technologies lacked: the capacity to master and execute nonroutine tasks.
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From page 109... ...
Artificial Intelligence and the Workforce 109
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