How New Tech Will Remake Tomorrow’s Global Economy

IMF News, November 8, 2016

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Andrew McAfee compares the development of powerful and useful artificial intelligence to "electricity and the internal combustion engine."
AI provides "a global colleague, or a second opinion—another flavor of intelligence that can examine evidence, draw inferences from it, and reach conclusions about it."
AI systems can identify important patterns from examples without explicit instruction: "We show it enough examples and it says, hey, this is interesting."
McAfee forecasts AI will be "a great colleague to have," implying broad productivity and decision-support effects across sectors.

Routine physical and cognitive work that built the middle class in post-war decades "are jobs that are not coming back."
Reasons for job displacement:
- Migration of jobs to low wage countries.
- Automation replacing routine tasks.
McAfee cautions historical patterns may not guarantee continued labor demand: "we have 200 years of needing a lot of labor. I think this time might be different."
Tasks where human advantage persists:
- Dexterity, locomotion, perception combined with task-switching remain hard for robots; these are "not going to change in the next three to five years."
- Interpersonal and social skills: humans are "the world champions" at tapping into social drives.
- High-income skills expected to remain valuable: "entrepreneurship, creativity, and deep quantitative expertise."
Middle- and lower-middle-class job skills "are not all going away," but are often under-emphasized relative to automation risks.

Primary recommendation: "stop educating people to be the kinds of workers we needed 50 years ago."
Critique of traditional schooling: previously aimed to teach students to "absorb facts and regurgitate them" and "sit there in an orderly grid and listen to the voice of authority."
Skills to prioritize and develop early:
- Intellectual curiosity
- Problem identification and problem solving
- Group work
- Creativity
- Self-motivation and self-direction
McAfee asserts: "Yes, we can absolutely teach these things."

Technological advances depend on energy availability; McAfee cites Bill Gates: "We desperately need an energy revolution in the 21st century; we might just get one."
Potential energy solutions referenced: "alternative sources of energy, and nuclear power—if we confront the evidence about it properly and embrace it a great deal more—we can meet our energy needs."
Electrification historically transformed industry and household life; electricity enabled fundamental productivity and welfare improvements.

In advanced economies, expect rapid deployment of frontier technologies: "science-fiction kinds of self-driving trucks and artificial intelligence for customer service and medical diagnoses."
In developing countries, a transformative effect comes from interconnection: "for the very first time ever, interconnecting the majority of humanity with each other and with the world’s knowledge resources."
Connectivity benefits: broader access to schools, libraries, telecommunications networks, and the ability for anyone to "contribute to those knowledge resources."
McAfee emphasizes reduced dependence on the "luck of our birth" for access to knowledge for kids born today in developing countries.

Interview: IMF Survey Interview, November 8, 2016 — Andrew McAfee with First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton.