Laurence Ales: What is the Impact of Technology on Factory Workers?

Laurence Ales, Tepper School Associate Professor of Economics, speaks about his research on how technology impacts manufacturing.

Video Transcript:

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Laurence Ales: We talk a lot about changes in technology, upcoming technological changes. And at the same time, we have very little direct measurement on what is going on.

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What we find is technology is changing both how we make goods and the nature of goods itself. The first statement, you should think about automation. We change how we're making the goods. We're automating certain tasks. The second one is we are changing how we design and construct objects. There are involved fewer parts, and that's also an implication for workers.

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So if I think about tasks that an operator might do in a plant, and I think about being, you know, easy, medium, and hard, where automation comes in is right at the middle. In terms of ability to control a machine or how fine you can see little objects. Those will be the jobs or the tasks that will be more easily automated. The second dimension we study is on part consolidation. You might see this for a more popular sense as added manufacturing or 3D printing, you know, as a general umbrella term. Where automation hollows out the middle, so this middle level of difficult skills are being removed, additive manufacturing and parts consolidation does the opposite. It removes, in general, lower and higher skilled tasks and rewards the middle. A big picture message for workers out there is that automation and consolidation are two opposing forces that might impact tasks of any occupation. That doesn't mean that that occupation might disappear. It might just mean that the majority of that occupation will evolve over time.

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