“Take accounting clerks: computers took over their least-skilled tasks – recording transactions, running manual calculations – freeing them for more complex work like explaining budget overruns or tracking down discrepancies between a company’s books and its bank account. That shift turned the accounting clerk’s job from a middle-class role into a smaller, more specialized one. Inventory clerks saw the opposite happen. Computers took over their single most valuable skill  – an encyclopedic knowledge of a warehouse’s physical stock; leaving them with simpler tasks like scanning barcodes and restocking shelves. That change pushed the inventory clerk’s role from a solid middle-class job into a lower-paid position open to a far larger pool of workers”

In a recent paper, Autor and Thompson find this pattern holds across more than 300 occupations over the past four decades. Autor put it simply: it’s almost never a straightforward race between humans and machines that machines simply win.

What matters for a given profession is whether technology enhances a worker’s expertise or commodifies that expertise.— David Autor, MIT economist