Aritificial intellegence and human labor: Substitutability and complimetarity

Project Outline

It has been a long time since concern was first expressed that development of artificial intelligence would deprive us of our work. For example, a report published by a consulting company at the end of 2015 states that 49% of Japanese employment can be replaced by machines. These studies assumes the substitutable/complementary relationship between labor and artificial intelligence technology along the axis of the traditional occupation database's labor characteristics; thus the current framework is not such that the substitutable/complementary relationship with labor is measured upon grasping the substance of artificial intelligence technology.

In our research and development project, conceptualizing the fundamental causes of determining the alternative/complementary relationship between machines, as represented by artificial intelligence, and labor; through the conceptualization, we further develop a method to grasp them by survey question items. We speculate that the key concept in that case lies in whether large-scale electronic data exists or not and in the difficulty of grasping the cause-effect relationship. Implementing a large-scale survey upon sophisticating this concept through interviews with scientists/engineers, we develop a new occupation database beyond the existing occupation database.

Investigators