1,721,006 research outputs found
Will your boss be an algorithm? A patent-based analysis of artificial intelligence worker management technologies and labour exposure
No full texthis paper assesses and quantifies the extant development of AI worker-management technologies, intended as AI-enhanced algorithmic technologies that execute functions typically in the realm of managerial decisions. We provide novel empirical evidence on their degree of penetration via an identification strategy based on patent technological classification. By means of natural language processing, we uncover specific scopes of application, and identify tasks and occupations most susceptible to technological exposure. Results point at a context-dependent exposure, of both managerial tasks subject to substitution, but also of managerial functions enhanced by these technologies. Subordinated activities conducted by mid-low hierarchies tend to be highly targeted in terms of control and monitoring, but not in terms of overall health and safety risks
Labour-saving heuristics in green patents: A natural language processing analysis
Full text linkThis paper provides a direct understanding of the labour-saving threats embedded in decarbonisation pathways. It starts with a mapping of the technological innovations characterised by both climate change mitigation/adaptation (green) and labour-saving attributes. To accomplish this, we draw on the universe of patent grants in the USPTO since 1976 to 2021 reporting the Y02-Y04S tagging scheme and we identify those patents embedding an explicit labour-saving heuristic via a dependency parsing algorithm. We characterise their technological, sectoral and time evolution. Finally, after constructing an index of sectoral penetration of LS and non-LS green patents, we explore its correlation with employment share growth at the state level in the US. Our evidence shows that employment shares in sectors characterised by a higher exposure to LS (non-LS) technologies present an overall negative (positive) growth dynamics
Asset Prices and Wealth Dynamics in a Financial Market with Random Demand Shocks
Full text linkWe study a financial market where some of the investors’ demands for a risky asset are exposed to random shocks. These shocks encompass a source of return variability whenever the wealth of traders subject to them is large, due to their transmission onto market clearing prices. By analytically investigating the underlying price and wealth dynamics, we provide conditions on agents’ portfolios under which such pass-through is either maximal, when the traders subject to demand shocks dominate, minimal, when the traders subject to demand shocks vanish, or endogenously determined, when all traders survive and their relative wealth dynamics is a mean reverting process. In particular, the pass-through emerges only when the average position in the risky asset of the traders subject to demand shocks is large enough to compensate from the losses they incur from buying at a high price (selling at a low price) whenever a positive (negative) demand shock occurs
Control in the era of surveillance capitalism: an empirical investigation of Italian Industry 4.0 factories
No full textWe explore the extent to which the current technological trend, dubbed Industry 4.0, might increase forms of control inside organisations, by focussing on pivotal firms in the so-called Italian Motor Valley currently embracing its adoption. We find that Industry 4.0 technologies open up great possibilities for incorporating the three forms of control identified by Orlikowski (Account Manag Inf Technol 1(1):9–42, https://doi.org/10.1016/0959-8022(91)90011-3, 1991), i.e. personal, bureaucratic, and social, into technological artefacts, often blending them together. If, on the one hand, this implies a technical and theoretical feasibility of enforcing forms of ‘Big Brother’ surveillance within the boundaries of organisations, and thereby of the workplace, on the other hand, the actual achievement of these possibilities depends on the organisational environment within which the new technologies are implemented
Back to the past: the historical roots of labor-saving automation
Full text linkThis paper, relying on a still relatively unexplored long-term dataset on U.S. patenting activity, provides empirical evidence on the history of labor-saving innovations back to early nineteenth century. The identification of mechanization/automation heuristics, retrieved via textual content analysis on current robotic technologies by Montobbio et al. (Robots and the origin of their labour-saving impact, LEM Working Paper Series 2020/03), allows to focus on a limited set of CPC codes where mechanization and automation technologies are more prevalent. We track their time evolution, clustering, eventual emergence of wavy behavior, and their comovements with long-term GDP growth. Our results challenge both the general-purpose technology approach and the strict 50-year Kondratiev cycle, while they provide evidence of the emergence of erratic constellations of heterogeneous technological artefacts, in line with the development-block approach enabled by autocatalytic systems
Workers’ awareness context in Italian 4.0 factories
Full text linkThe study of the co-evolution of processes of technological innovation and the resulting organisational changes has been a topic of interest since the first appearance of the idea of division of labour and specialisation in Adam Smith's works. The major phases of organisational change are in fact the result of 'waves' of technological innovations attributable to the various industrial revolutions. Nowadays, a new potential technological paradigm dubbed 'Industry 4.0' is shaping the manufacturing output of USA, Europe, and China, particularly in the automotive/engineering industry. With reference to the latter, the present research contribution aims at investigating, by means of field-work research activity, the degree of openness of the awareness context of workers and their intervention authority on the production process within three factories in the so-called Italian 'Motor Valley'. Together with state-of-the-art 4.0 technology adoption, these firms exhibit different organisational practices ranging from the Japanese Toyotism (Cesab-Toyota), to a mix of Taylorism and co-determination (Ducati), up to the example most akin to the German 'Mitbestimmung' (Lamborghini). This technological wave is fostering the process of making the production system lean. Our findings corroborate the presence of a hybrid process of Industry 4.0 adoption, reflected into a hybrid process of workforce empowerment
The Present, Past, and Future of Labor-Saving Technologies
No full textThe present chapter provides a historical reappraisal of labor-saving technologies. It reviews and systematizes theoretical contributions and empirical findings documenting the presence of labor- and time-saving heuristics in innovative efforts back since the First Industrial Revolution. More in detail, with the help of various patent analyses, the chapter documents the presence of labor-saving heuristics in the latest wave of technological innovation, detecting the human functions substituted by the underlying technologies. Against a reductionist approach conceiving robots as the only threat for labor displacement, it shall be argued that labor-saving technologies consist of a complex and heterogeneous bundle of innovations uncovering a much wider set of artifacts and functions. Motivated by the recurrent debate on the threats of automation occurring in the last couple of centuries, evidence is provided on the existence of long waves and clusters in relevant innovations, discussing how the overall cluster of labor-saving technologies consists of heterogeneous and often independent innovations following remarkably different time-trajectories. The chapter closes with an outline of potential future trends in labor-saving technologies and room for policy actions
Innovation and the labor market: theory, evidence and challenges
No full textThis paper deals with the complex relationship between innovation and the labor market, analyzing the impact of new technological advancements on overall employment, skills, and wages. After a critical review of the extant literature and the available empirical studies, novel evidence is presented on the distribution of laborsaving automation [namely robotics and artifcial intelligence (AI)], based on natural language processing of US patents. This mapping shows that both upstream high-tech providers and downstream users of new technologies—such as Boeing and Amazon—lead the underlying innovative effort
The empirics of technology, employment and occupations:Lessons learned and challenges ahead
Full text linkWhat have we learned, from the most recent years of debate and analysis, of the future of work being threatened by technology? This paper presents a critical review of the empirical literature and outlines both lessons learned and challenges ahead. Far from being fully exhaustive, the review intends to highlight common findings and main differences across economic studies. According to our reading of the literature, a few challenges-and also the common factors affecting heterogeneous outcomes across studies-still stand, including (i) the variable used as a proxy for technology, (ii) the level of aggregation of the analyses, (iii) the deep heterogeneity of different types of technologies and their adopted mix, (iv) the structural differences across adopters, and (v) the actual combination of the organisational practices in place at the establishment level in affecting net job creation/destruction and work re-organisation.<br/
Labour-saving automation:A direct measure of occupational exposure
Full text linkThis article represents one of the first attempts at building a direct measure of occupational exposure to robotic labour-saving technologies. After identifying robotic and labour-saving robotic patents, the underlying 4-digit CPC (Cooperative Patent Classification) code definitions, together with O*NET (Occupational Information Network) task descriptions, are employed to detect functions and operations which are more directed to substituting the labour input and their exposure to labour-saving automation. This measure allows us to obtain fine-grained information on tasks and occupations according to their text similarity ranking. Occupational exposure by wage and employment dynamics in the United States is then studied, and complemented by investigating industry and geographical penetration rates
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