The Impact of Technological Change on Workers in the Modern Era

"What has been the impact of technological change on workers in the modern era? To what extent do the benefits outweigh the costs."
Productivity, the amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an hour of labor, is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation (How Technology Is Destroying Jobs, by David Rothman in 2013). Labor productivity can grow for several reasons, including technological change, quality of the labor force and greater capital investments (or capital deepening). Computerisation has changed the relative value of skills, lowering the value of routine cognitive and manual tasks and increasing the value of non-routine cognitive and interactive tasks (It’s Not About the Machines, by Roger Pielke Jr in 2012). The advent of computerisation also marks a qualitative enlargement in the set of tasks that machines can perform. They augment or supplant human cognition in a large set of information-processing tasks that historically were not amenable to mechanization: storing, retrieving, and acting upon information , as postulated by Autor in The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change. The capability of computers to substitute for workers in carrying out cognitive tasks is limited, however. Tasks demanding flexibility, creativity, generalized problem-solving, and complex communications are not yet encompassed by computers, but have grown to be highly enhanced by then. Regardless, computerization has become the key defining factor that distinguishes changes in technology in the modern era from movements in capital deepening and productivity in the past. This paper will explore the impacts of this computerisation upon labour in terms of productivity, employment and the structures thereof.
As with most technology, the adaptation of computer capital has become more widespread due to its cheaper cost, raising demand for workers who perform tasks that cannot be duplicated by computers, i.e., non-routine tasks, and the

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