What Can Past Technological Revolutions Tell Us About Today?

While the furor around robots taking our jobs has largely died down in recent years (not least due to the lack of any real evidence that it's happening), it remains inevitable that the introduction of new technologies will cause disruption in the labor market. "Throughout history the introduction of new technologies has had an inevitable impact on the labour market, whether through displacing jobs, creating new ones, or significantly altering those that already exist," Alexander Dick, Executive Chairman of cloud technology firm VeUP says. "Technologies like AI and robotics are not going to be any different and we're already seeing this across the economy at the moment, with some new jobs being created, some being displaced, and many being altered by the introduction of these new technologies." Research from the Kellogg School explores historical periods of technology-driven disruption to see if there are any patterns around the kinds of workers that get disrupted, and indeed how that disruption affected their current and future income. The researchers developed an approach to gauge the exposure of workers to new technology.