Project Team
Students
Taiur Zain
Energy Business and Finance
Penn State University Park
Faculty Mentors
Joel Landry
Penn State University Park
Energy and Mineral Engineering
Project
Project Video
Project Abstract
Historically, technological change has focused on labor-augmenting technologies, such as the computer, which increase the productivity of workers by augmenting or extending their labor capacities. However, recently a new task view of labor has been developed that distinguishes between labor-augmenting technologies and labor-displacing technologies (Autour, 2015; Acemoglu and Restrepo, 2019), such as the growth in industrial robots, automated processes, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in which automation displaces the tasks completed by humans. This task view of labor has been used by labor economists to assess how automation explains the decline in productivity growth and stagnant wage growth for unskilled and medium skilled workers over the past few decades. Climate change also has tremendous potential to alter the distribution of tasks that humans are able to complete. Contemporaneous climate change—reflecting changes in the historical distribution of weather—may in fact partially explain the recent rise in automation and its resulting impacts on productivity and wage growth. Future climate change will also affect the rate of future technological change as a result of automation and potentially have significant implications on future productivity, wage growth and inequality.
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