CONCEPT
The New Work Hypothesis
Autor's empirical finding that the majority of contemporary jobs — titles, tasks, and categories — did not exist in 1940, and the corresponding claim that technology creates new work even as it destroys old work.
The new work hypothesis is Autor's answer to the recurring fear that technology destroys more jobs than it creates. Using the Census Occupation Index — which has catalogued job titles across eight decades — Autor and collaborators documented that approximately 60% of employment in 2018 was in occupations that either did not exist or were negligible in 1940. New work includes not only obviously technological occupations (software engineer, data scientist) but also entire categories of services (home health aide, yoga instructor, financial planner) that emerged as rising incomes and new technologies created demand for activities that had no prior commercial form. The hypothesis does not deny that automation destroys jobs; it argues that the economy's long-run dynamic is one of continuous task creation at the frontier of what is newly possible or newly valuable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The hypothesis operationalized an old intuition with new precision. Economists since Schumpeter had spoken