Lucas Perry

Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast.

I'm Lucas Perry.

Today's episode is with James Meninka and is focused on global economic and technological trends.

As the agricultural and industrial revolutions both led to significant shifts in human labor and welfare, so too is the ongoing digital revolution, driven by innovations such as big data, AI, the digital economy, and robotics.

also radically affecting productivity, labor markets, and the future of work.

And being in the midst of such radical change ourselves, it can be quite difficult to keep track of where we exactly are and where we're heading.

While this particular episode is not centrally focused on existential risk, we feel that it's important to understand the current and projected impacts of technologies like AI and the ongoing benefits and risks of their use to society at large in order to increase our wisdom and understanding of what beneficial futures really consist of.

It's in the spirit of this that we explore global economic and technological trends with James Meninka in this episode.

James received a PhD from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science.

He is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, as well as chairman and director of McKinsey Global Institute.

James advised the chief executives and founders of many of the world's leading tech companies on strategy and growth, product, and business innovation.

and was also appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as vice chair of the Global Development Council at the White House.

James is most recently the author of the book, No Ordinary Disruption, The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends.

And it's with that, I'm happy to present this interview with James Meninka.

To start things off here, I'm curious if you could start by explaining what you think are some of the most important problems in the world today.

We have climate change, we have social inequality, we have the ways in which different societies are progressing at different rates.

So given these issues in the world, what do you think it is that humanity really needs to understand or get right in this century given these problems?

So before we drill more deeply into climate change and inequality, are there any other issues that you would add as some of the most crucial problems or questions for the 21st century?

So in the realms of climate change and inequality and these new geopolitical situations and tensions that are arising, how do you see the role of incentives pushing these systems and problems in certain directions and how it is that we come up with solutions to them given the power and motivational force of incentives?

Emerging from this is a pretty complex picture, I think, of the way in which the world is changing.