The complexity of the future of work

Rapidly advancing cognitive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), have the potential to drastically impact modern society and to shape the future of work. Accordingly, policy makers and researchers seek forecasts into technological change and labor trends, including growing job polarization and income inequality as well as decreasing career mobility and spatial mobility for workers. Although a given technology impacts demand for only a narrow set of workplace skills, modern empirical work relies on coarse labor distinctions between cognitive and physical or routine and non-routine work to explain employment trends. In this dissertation, I explore the complex ways that skills and employment undergird aggregate labor dynamics in the US. As a motivating example, I demonstrate how simple measures for skills within a labor market contribute to the differential impact of automation across US cities of different sizes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Program in Media Arts and Sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Frank, Morgan Ryan.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Iyad Rahwan.

• Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123625

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123625