Lecture by Julia Jabłońska, an SGH Student, at the Upcoming Warsaw Economic Seminar

We cordially invite you to attend the upcoming seminar of the Warsaw Economic Seminars series, which will take place on May 29, 2025. The study entitled „Elasticity of Substitution Between Digital Software and Human Cognitive Work” will be present by Julia Jabłońska, a student of the Warsaw School of Economics.

The seminar will begin at 17:00 in Room A203 at the Faculty of Economic Sciences. Participants will also have the option to join the event remotely via the Zoom platform.

Link to the meeting:  https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/j/93278126659?pwd=HAlBLR5bz9uqFroMDWLPnPF02vgqWi.1

[Meeting ID: 932 7812 6659
Passcode: 014067]

Below, we provide an abstract of the presentation.

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We document the mechanisms of economic growth in the era of rapidly advancing automation and artificial intelligence (AI), employing a “hardware–software” framework. This framework posits that production requires both energy and information, supplied respectively by hardware — including physical labor, capital, and computational power — and software, comprising human cognitive labor and digital algorithms, particularly AI. We analyze two alternative datasets to trace the dynamic expansion of software, using data for the United States (1968–2019) and for a panel of 21 advanced economies (2000–2019). Our findings show that software—both in the form of human cognitive work and digital machines—has significantly outpaced its hardware counterpart in terms of growth. We further apply a five-equation system, incorporating a nested CES production function and first-order conditions for factor demands, to estimate the elasticities of substitution between human analytical input and digital software. While estimates vary across countries, our results consistently indicate that human cognitive work and digital software are gross complements in production.