Perhaps. Not necessarily, though. If you originally have job 1, job 2, and job 3 in your factory, and then you replace job 2 and job 3 with robots but keep people around to do job 1, the people doing job 1 haven’t really gotten any more efficient at it. The factory owner can continue to pay the people who do job 1 the same, and just pocket the difference between the capital investment of the robots and the wages he used to pay for job 2 and job 3.
(Now, technically, the way productivity is calculated by economists you would be correct, since it’s just based on “total production divided by number of workers”. That doesn’t actually mean that person A is more efficient at doing job 1, though, not in the sense that we usually mean.)
Whoever remains after you fire all those made redundant has been made more efficient.
Perhaps. Not necessarily, though. If you originally have job 1, job 2, and job 3 in your factory, and then you replace job 2 and job 3 with robots but keep people around to do job 1, the people doing job 1 haven’t really gotten any more efficient at it. The factory owner can continue to pay the people who do job 1 the same, and just pocket the difference between the capital investment of the robots and the wages he used to pay for job 2 and job 3.
(Now, technically, the way productivity is calculated by economists you would be correct, since it’s just based on “total production divided by number of workers”. That doesn’t actually mean that person A is more efficient at doing job 1, though, not in the sense that we usually mean.)