Name: 【TED】Will automation take away all our jobs? | David Autor
Uploaded: 2017-02-27T11:28:45.000Z
Duration: 18 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine,

those vending machines that dispense cash,

the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States

from about a quarter of a million to a half a million.

A quarter of a million in 1970 to about a half a million today,

by Boston University economist James Bessen,

and why hasn't automation eliminated their employment by now?

many of the great inventions of the last 200 years

to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil.

error-prone, inconsistent human calculation

And yet, the fraction of US adults employed in the labor market

and it's risen in just about every decade

Our machines increasingly do our work for us.

Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete?

I'm going to try to answer that question tonight,

and along the way, I'm going to tell you what this means for the future of work

and the challenges that automation does and does not pose

There are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake.

The other has to do with human insatiability,

I'm going to call the first of these the O-ring principle,

and it determines the type of work that we do.

The second principle is the never-get-enough principle,

and it determines how many jobs there actually are.

had two countervailing effects on bank teller employment.

As you would expect, they replaced a lot of teller tasks.

The number of tellers per branch fell by about a third.

But banks quickly discovered that it also was cheaper to open new branches,

and the number of bank branches increased by about 40 percent

The net result was more branches and more tellers.

But those tellers were doing somewhat different work.

As their routine, cash-handling tasks receded,

and introducing them to new products like credit cards, loans and investments:

more tellers doing a more cognitively demanding job.

technical expertise and intuitive mastery,

perspiration and inspiration in the words of Thomas Edison.

In general, automating some subset of those tasks

was an inexpensive rubber O-ring in the booster rocket

that had frozen on the launchpad the night before

and failed catastrophically moments after takeoff.

made the difference between mission success

and the calamitous death of seven astronauts.

An ingenious metaphor for this tragic setting

named by Harvard economist Michael Kremer

The O-ring production function conceives of the work

Every one of those links must hold for the mission to succeed.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Will automation take away all our jobs? | David Autor

eliminate

progress

determine

typically