How can previous industrial revolutions help us to understand the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs? draw on any material provided in files to support/ justify their answer Word limit: 150-200 words no more and no less. A simple structure for presenting an evidenced-based argument in writing is to follow the following structure; Claim: the solution to the problem Reason: the explanation of the claim Evidence: facts and data that lend support to the reason The objectives of this activity are to: • Identify the key structure of an evidenced-based argument 1. Read the excerpt below taken from Morgenstern, M. (2016)“The impact on jobs - Automation and anxiety - Will smarter machines cause mass unemployment?”, The Economist. Jun 25th edition. 2. Identify the following: o The Claim o The Reason o The Evidence “Yet in the past technology has always ended up creating more jobs than it destroys. That is because of the way automation works in practice, explains David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Automating a particular task, so that it can be done more quickly or cheaply, increases the demand for human workers to do the other tasks around it that have not been automated. There are many historical examples of this in weaving, says James Bessen, an economist at the Boston University School of Law. During the Industrial Revolution more and more tasks in the weaving process were automated, prompting workers to focus on the things machines could not do, such as operating a machine, and then tending multiple machines to keep them running smoothly. This caused output to grow explosively. In America during the 19th century the amount of coarse cloth a single weaver could produce in an hour increased by a factor of 50, and the amount of labour required per yard of cloth fell by 98%. This made cloth cheaper and increased demand for it, which in turn created more jobs for weavers: their numbers quadrupled between 1830 and 1900. In other words, technology gradually changed the nature of the weaver’s job, and the skills required to do it, rather than replacing it altogether. In a more recent example, automated teller machines (ATMs) might have been expected to spell doom for bank tellers by taking over some of their routine tasks, and indeed in America their average number fell from 20 per branch in 1988 to 13 in 2004, Mr Bessen notes. But that reduced the cost of running a bank branch, allowing banks to open more branches in response to customer demand. The number of urban bank branches rose by 43% over the same period, so the total number of employees increased. Rather than destroying jobs, ATMs changed bank employees’ work mix, away from routine tasks and towards things like sales and customer service that machines could not do.”

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