MBA professors identified which kinds of workers are most at risk when new tech comes along — and the ones who'll stay relatively safe
at the MIT Sloan School of Management, devised a new way to measure how people's exposure to technology — that is, their risk of being displaced by new inventions — changed over time.
As one might expect, manual physical jobs were the most exposed to technological change. But cognitive occupations weren't immune from risk. Routine cognitive jobs, in particular, started becoming much more exposed starting around the 1970s, as information technology began to take off. And this increased exposure presented a tangible risk for all categories of workers. Based on U.S. Census surveys from 1910 to 2010, the team found that an increase in technology exposure was linked to a decline in employment. And wage data starting in the 1980s suggested that more exposure led to lower income.
One of the most striking findings emerged when the team looked at workers who had reached the top income tier within an exposed profession — for example, clerks or machine operators who earned relatively high salaries compared with their peers. These employees saw their wages slow down by more than twice as much as average workers in the same occupation with the same level of technology exposure."For the people that are really skilled, they have a lot of room to fall," he says.
For instance, a clerk who was highly competent at using a certain record-keeping system might need to learn new software, or an experienced machine operator might be faced with unfamiliar equipment. People who had invested a lot of time and effort into mastering now-obsolete methods could be laid off; or if they stayed at their jobs, their wages could stagnate or decline.
Technology also wasn't a uniformly negative force. The team conducted a separate analysis to identify patents in various industries that did not overlap with occupational tasks. Exposure to those advances was actually linked to an increase in workers' incomes, likely because the inventions had helped them become more productive.
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