The Work Ahead

Smith theorized the division of labor. Ricardo worried about machines displacing weavers. Keynes, in 1930, predicted his grandchildren would work fifteen-hour weeks and that the hardest problem would be what to do with all the leisure. David Autor’s task-based framework — the most influential modern theory of how technology reshapes labor — showed that computerization doesn’t simply replace jobs; it replaces tasks, polarizing employment into high-skill and low-skill work while hollowing out the middle.

Each was thinking about the same question: what happens to people when the nature of work changes?