Future of Life Institute Podcast
James Manyika on Global Economic and Technological Trends
07 Sep 2021
Full Episode
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.
Well, first of all, thank you for having me. Gosh, what are the most important problems in the world? I think we have the challenge of climate change. I think we have the challenge of inequality. I think we have the challenge that economic growth and development is happening unevenly.
So I should say that the inequality question, I think, is mostly an inequality within countries, but to some extent also between countries. And this idea of uneven development is that some countries are surging ahead. and some parts of the world potentially being left behind. I think we have other sociopolitical questions, but I'm not qualified to talk about those. I don't really spend my time.
I'm not a sociologist or a political scientist, but I think we do have some sociopolitical challenges too.
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