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Stephen M. Kellen Lecture

Rethinking Work: Meeting the Challenges of the Robot and AI Revolution

Where will the coming generation of workers find jobs?  And will the jobs be worth having? People have worried about losing their jobs to technology at least since the Luddites 200 years ago.  In the aggregate, they have been wrong.  The automobile put lots of stable boys and saddle makers out of work, but it created vastly more jobs making cars, and fueling them and repairing them, and it opened the way for whole new industries like roadside motels and restaurants.  With robots increasingly performing the tasks once done by blue-collar labor, however, and computers and artificial intelligence now eliminating the need for many workers once thought to be immune because of their cognitive skills, today’s technological threat seems different.  It is no longer just the unskilled and undereducated whose jobs are at risk.  Moreover, the challenge may be especially acute in countries like Germany and America, where wages are far higher than in many other countries and an ever greater share of what we consume and invest not only can be provided from overseas but often is. Does the next generation of workers, then, face a genuine threat from advancing workplace technology?  If so, what are the dangers – not just economic, but social, political, even moral – to these countries?  Most important, what can we do about it?