David Autor

So in a recent paper with Anna Solomons and Carolyn Chin and Brian Segler, we estimate that about 60% of employment in 2020 is in occupational specialties that were not present in 1940.

So you might say, well, what does new work exactly mean?

It's all work.

What makes it new?

From our perspective, what makes work new is that it requires new expertise.

It requires knowledge or skills or specialized capabilities that weren't present.

That could be in software.

It could be in fuel injection systems in cars or could be in tattooing.

There's a lot of personal services that also require new expertise.

So what makes work new is it requires some specialized skill set that some people possess that not everyone possesses and that it produces something of value.

And this is a huge challenge because it's very hard when we look forward to the future.

It's easy to imagine what will be automated, things we're doing that we won't be doing.

But it's much harder to say what will we be doing that we aren't doing right now.

In the turn of the 20th century, about 38% of U.S.

employment was in agriculture.

Now it's under 2%.

But if you had gone to people 100 years ago and say, hey, what do you think all you farmers will be doing, your kids, a century from now, they would not have said, oh, I don't know, search engine optimization, neural networks, malware, pediatric oncology.

They wouldn't have been able to imagine it.

So it's not just as we've automated or advanced our technology, it's not that we just do a narrower and narrower set of things by humans and everything else done by machines.

The variety of work, I would say, is much broader than it used to be 100 years ago.