Since the first decades of the 20th century, there has been concern that automation, including mechanization, computing, and more recently robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), will take away jobs and damage the labor market. There has also been concern that large, dominant firms will capture whatever value is created by automating technologies. In an effort to understand these issues, a wide variety of scholars have studied automation. Automation has been studied at a number of levels, including country, industry, firm, occupation, and even the occupational-task level, and by a range of disciplines, including economics, innovation, management, organizational theory, sociology, and strategy. This annotated bibliography attempts to include a range of literature that speaks to these different levels and different disciplines. It includes articles that are older, foundational pieces so readers can familiarize themselves with the major work in the area, as well as more recent articles so readers can get a sense of current research interests and opportunities. Notably, much of the recent research is focused on the effects of AI and robotics on workers, firms, and the economy. It is likely that there will be a large increase in research in this space in the coming years, especially as more data on the adoption of these technologies becomes available, and that this research will tell us much more about how these technologies are affecting our economy in the 21st century as well as inform our understanding of automation more generally.
Artificial intelligence in cancer research: learning at different levels of data granularity
