Published: November 6, 2020
As more organizations adopt automation, and for the purposes of this episode, robotics, into their day-to-day functions, questions remain regarding the impact. Are robots replacing their human counterparts or enhancing their work? Or is the answer more complex? And what are the economic implications?
Joining me to provide some insight on the actual impact is Lynn Wu, professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. We’ll be discussing her study, “The Robot Revolution: Managerial and Employment Consequences for Firms,” which will be published in the INFORMS journal Management Science.
Contrary to the popular notion that robots will displace human labor – we’ve seen a ton of press reports on this – we actually find that robot adopting firms employed more people over time. In fact, we find that any displacement of labor actually comes from firms that did not adopt robots.
Interviewed this episode:
Lynn Wu
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
Lynn Wu is an associate professor (with tenure) at the Wharton School. She teaches MBA, undergraduate and PhD classes about the use and impact of emerging technologies on business.
Her research examines how emerging information technologies, such as artificial intelligence and analytics, affect innovation, business strategy, and productivity. Specifically, her work follows three streams. In the first stream, she examines how data analytics and artificial intelligence affect firm innovation, business strategy, labor demand, and productivity for both large firms and startups. In her second stream, she studies how enterprise social media and online platforms affect work performance, career trajectories, entrepreneurship success, and the formation of new type of biases that arise from using technologies. In her third stream of research, Lynn leverages fine-grained nanodata available through online digital traces to predict economic indicators such as real estate trends, labor trends and product adoption.
Lynn has published articles in economics, management and computer science. Her work has been widely covered by media outlets, including, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, Businessweek, New York Times, Forbes, and The Economist. She has won numerous awards such as Early Career awards from INFORMS and AIS, best paper awards from Information System Research, AIS, ICIS, HICSS, CHITA, and Kauffman. She has also won the Dean’s teaching award.
Lynn received her undergraduate degrees from MIT (Finance and Computer Science), her master’s degree from MIT (Computer Science) and her Ph.D. from MIT Sloan School of Management (Management Science). Lynn has experiences working with a variety of firms in the technology industry (e.g. IBM, SAP, Google, Facebook etc), government agencies and think tanks (e.g the World Bank, the Russel Sage Foundation). She has also consulted and advised several startups. Prior to academia, she was a software engineer and a research scientist at MIT AI lab and IBM.
Episode Transcript
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