Here are 2 videos on this topic, and 3 images based on this recent pierce by The Atlantic: Three Ways to Think About AI and Jobs: Whether automation will make human workers obsolete depends on more than just how smart the AI is.By Rogé Karma. This is a 5* read!

“According to the MIT economists David Autor and Neil Thompson, the divergence between these two professions (weak bundles or strong bundles) boils down to the interaction of technology and expertise.

For accounting clerks, computers replaced many of their least expert skills; the hours they had spent recording transactions and performing manual calculations could now be reallocated to more complex tasks, such as explaining why a department had blown through its budget and figuring out sources of discrepancies between a company’s bank account and its books. This turned the accounting clerk’s job from a middle-class one into a smaller, more professionalized one.

For inventory clerks, on the other hand, computers replaced their most expert skill set—their encyclopedic knowledge of a warehouse’s physical inventory—leaving them to perform more basic tasks such as scanning items and restocking shelves. This transformed the inventory clerk’s role from a well-paying middle-class profession into a lower-paid job with a far bigger pool of potential workers.

In a recent paper, Autor and Thompson find that this basic pattern has held up across more than 300 occupations over the past four decades. “The story is almost never as simple as: We’re in a race with machines and machines will win”

“What matters for a given profession is whether technology enhances a worker’s expertise or commodifies that expertise.”

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