A Method to Link Advances in Artificial Intelligence to Occupational Abilities

摘要

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great promise as an innovation that may lead to economic growth (Council of Economic Advisers 2016; Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb forthcoming; Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson forthcoming). For example, according to Graetz and Michaels (2015), robotics, an advanced technology with similarities to AI, added an estimated 0.37 percentage points of annual GDP growth between 1993 and 2007 on average for the 17 countries in their sample (accounting for about one-tenth of GDP growth during this time period). The authors note that these effects are of similar magnitude to the impact of steam engines on growth in the United Kingdom.However, while AI may boost growth, the effect on labor is less clear. Historically there is empirical evidence that automation can both complement and substitute for labor (Autor and Salomons 2017; Bessen 2017). In the specific case of robots, research provides mixed findings, with some researchers finding no effect of robots on labor (Graetz and Michaels 2015), and others finding evidence that robot adoption leads to job losses (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017). To date, however, there has been little systematic empirical research on the link between AI and labor, and the handful of existing studies arrive at different findings.