Must-Read: David Autor: The Limits of the Digital Revolution: Why Our Washing Machines Won’t Go to the Moon

Must-Read: David Autor: The Limits of the Digital Revolution: Why Our Washing Machines Won’t Go to the Moon: “Much of what can be readily automated as repetitive information and tasks has been done…

…and the frontiers are elsewhere… into higher-level abstract reasoning and tasks that require some mixture of creativity, and intuition, and expertise, and also moving downward into jobs that require physical dexterity and some cognitive flexibility. It’s not that we’ve reached the limits of… computerisation… it’s just that that particular strand that has been so important has not completely played out but is not the frontier…. A lot of the computerisation has been most evident in the so-called ‘middle-skill activities’ and that process is to a substantial extent complete, but that means that it will move into other activities. Whether that’s worse or better depends very much on who you are…. It corresponds to rising productivity…. It has distributional consequences…. If you’re doing a job and all of a sudden a machine can do it cheaper, that’s almost never going to be a good thing for you. If you’re doing a job and a machine makes you more productive at doing that work, that’s almost always a good thing for you…