In a Wall Street Journal series examining the roots of America’s current economic disillusionment and how it is impacting the presidential election, Jon Hilsenrath and Bob Davis highlight Prof. Erik Brynjolfsson and Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s work examining how technology impacts jobs, and Prof. David Autor’s research on how trade with China has affected the U.S. labor market.
Prof. David Autor spoke with The Economist about the impact of artificial intelligence and automation on jobs. “This notion that there’s only a finite amount of work to do, and therefore that if you automate some of it there’s less for people to do, is just totally wrong,” he says.
In an article for Slate, Madeleine Clare Elish highlights a study by Prof. Frank Levy that found that only certain tasks in the field of law could be automated. Levy and his colleagues found that “dramatic impacts are unlikely due to technical limitations of machine intelligence as well as social expectations of a lawyer’s value.”
Research co-authored by Prof. Frank Levy in DUSP examined the efficiency of robotic legal assistants. “They concluded that only about 13 percent of legal work will be taken over by computers within the next five years,” writes Aviva Rutkin for New Scientist.
Ray Brescia writes for The Huffington Post about a new paper co-authored by Prof. Frank Levy that examines the impact of automation on lawyers. The research suggests that, “at the core of what we value the most about the practice of law are things that lawyers can do better than computers.”