Event Summary
Richard Baldwin, professor at the Graduate Institute, Geneva and founder of VoxEU.org, discussed his compelling new book, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work on February 7, 2019, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).
The Globotics Upheaval provides a thought-provoking analysis of how a new form of globalization will combine with software robots to disrupt service-sector and professional jobs in the same way automation and trade disrupted manufacturing jobs in the past. This publication puts today's disruption in the context of two historical cycles where technological impulses produced economic transformations, upheavals, backlashes, and resolutions. Baldwin provides a concise overview of what types of jobs will be affected by software robots and pervasive translation that open new opportunities for outsourcing to tele-migrants. He argues persuasively that future jobs will be more human and involve more face-to-face contact since software robots and tele-migrants will do everything else.
Richard E. Baldwin has been professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva since 1991. He was director of the Centre of Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London from 2014 to 2018. He has been senior editor of Economic Policy since 2014 and founder and editor-in-chief of VoxEU.org since March 2006. He was visiting research professor at the University of Oxford from 2012 to 2015 and visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology during September 2002–January 2003 and September 1998–February 1999. Previously, he was associate professor (1989–91) and assistant professor (1986–89) at Columbia University Business School.