Repetitive work on an assembly line is easier to automate than the work of a janitor. Routine clerical work like processing payments is easier to automate than handling customers’ questions. At present, machines are not very good at walking up stairs, picking up a paperclip from the floor, or reading the emotional cues of a frustrated customer. To capture these distinctions, work by our MIT colleagues Daron Acemoglu and David Autor suggests that work can be divided into a two-by-two matrix: cognitive versus manual and routine versus nonroutine.25 They found that the demand for work has been
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