Modeling Automation

摘要

Computer-assisted machines, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) have already spread in many industries and automated several parts of the production process. However, we are far from a consensus on how automation should be conceptualized and modeled.Most economic models formalize technological change as factor augmenting (meaning that technological progress acts as if it increased the effective units of one of the factors of production) or as Hicks neutral (which leads to a proportionate increase in the output obtained from any input combination). Several authors, including Sachs and Kotlikoff (2012), Graetz and Michaels (2015), and Nordhaus (2015), also model automation as capital-augmenting technological change, which assumes that automation should be thought of as embodied in more productive (or cheaper) capital, which will then substitute for labor in a process governed by the elasticity of substitution. Bessen (2017), on the other hand, argues that automation mostly increases the productivity of labor and models automation as labor-augmenting technological change.