Ajay Agrawal, Joshua S. Gans, and Avi Goldfarb: Artificia...

Ajay Agrawal, Joshua S. Gans, and Avi Goldfarb: Artificial Intelligence: The Ambiguous Labor Market Impact of Automating Prediction: "Artificial intelligence does not fit easily into existing analyses of the effect of automation on labor markets. The reasons are threefold. First, prediction is always strictly complementary to other tasks���namely decision-related tasks. Those tasks can be existing or newly possible because of better prediction. Second, better prediction improves decisions���whether taken by labor or capital���by enabling more nuanced decisions through the reduction of uncertainty. Finally, it is not yet possible to say whether the net impact on decision tasks���whether existing or new��� is likely to favor labor or capital. We have found important examples of both, and there is no obvious reason for a particular bias to emerge. Thus, we caution on drawing broad inferences from the research on factory automation (for example, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2017; Autor and Salomons 2018) in forecasting the net near-term consequences of artificial intelligence for labor markets...

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