"[T]he paper explains how the ongoing Digital Revolution is characterized by a complex interplay between worker skills and digital capital in the workplace, and consequent changes in job mobility for workers and in output prices affecting consumer demand for goods and services. In particular, it explains how current worker–technology interactions and the equilibrium effects they entail combine to create economy-wide job polarization with winners and losers from ongoing technological progress".
"[T]he final and most recent hypothesis is that of routine-biased technological change (RBTC), embedded in the task assignment model of Acemoglu and Autor (2011). Their model works to capture two forces that are central to understanding recent human-machine interactions.
(i) Technological progress is not increasing labour productivity (as in SBTC) or best captured by a decrease in the price of capital (as in CSC). Instead, the Digital Revolution is assumed to directly replace workers doing routine and therefore codable tasks. Hence the name routine-biased technological change.
(ii) There is self-selection of workers of different skill levels (low-, medium-, and high-skilled workers) across different tasks (least, middling, and most complex tasks) according to comparative advantage, as in Roy (1951)"
"[N]ote that RBTC predicts that the Digital Revolution will lead to job polarization in employment, rather than skill-upgrading as was the case for SBTC and CSC. The process of job polarization implies that there is a u-shaped relationship between employment share changes over time and jobs (e.g. occupations with different task contents) ranked by their wage or educational attainment."
