Dive Brief:
- Digital technology scares people. According to a New York Times story, dire warnings have come from no less than Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates. “Summoning the demon” was Musk’s evocative phrase to describe the potential danger posed by artificial intelligence.
- A group of academics, Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and executives acknowledged the issue this week, when they posted an open letter in an effort to start a national discussion on modernizing policy for the digital economy.
- Past waves of technological change, they noted in the letter, have delivered new jobs and higher wages—but, they warned, not this time. Or, to paraphrase a lot of the media coverage: Will robots eat our jobs?
Dive Insight:
Not necessarily, according to the Times, which cites a study by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, titled, "A Labor Market That Works: Connecting Talent With Opportunity in the Digital Age."
By 2025, McKinsey estimates, digital talent platforms could add $2.7 trillion a year to global gross domestic product, which would be the equivalent of adding another Britain to the world economy. And the digital tools, the report states, could benefit as many as 540 million people in various ways, including better matches of their skills with jobs, higher wages, and shorter stints of unemployment.
Also, employers that make efficient use of the digital platforms, McKinsey says, can increase their productivity by up to 9% by hiring the right workers for jobs more often and more quickly.
