In his 2015 paper, the MIT economist David Autor asked why, given the rapid technological advances of the 20th century and the apparently accelerating automation of so many areas of work, there are still so many jobs?
Clearly, human labour has not been made obsolete, despite predictions from some such as John Maynard Keynes in 1930 that automation by machines would mean we would be working 15-hour weeks by now.
So what is going on?
Autor’s key example is bank tellers. ATMs were introduced to the United States in the 1970s, and the number more than quadrupled between 1990 and 2010. But the number of bank tellers – whose jobs these new technology would ostensibly replace – also increased over this time.
The explanation for this counter-intuitive effect is twofold:
- first, the ATMs made running the branches of banks cheaper, so the number of total branches (and the demand for tellers) dramatically increased,
- and second, they gave the tellers more time away from mundane computational and currency-handling activity to actually engage with customers,…
