Event Recording:

Automation, AI and robotics are changing our lives quickly - but digital disruption goes much further than we realise.

In this talk, Richard Baldwin, one of the world's leading globalisation experts, will explain that exponential growth in computing, transmission and storage capacities is also creating a new form of 'virtual' globalisation that could undermine the foundations of middle-class prosperity in the West.

This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book signing, all welcome.

About the speaker

Richard Baldwin is Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva since 1991, Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU.org since he founded it in 2007, and ex-President of CEPR, and. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford (2012-2015), and MIT (2003). In terms of government service, he was a Senior Staff Economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisors in the Bush Administration (1990-1991) on leave from Columbia University Business School where he was Associate Professor.

He did his PhD in Economics at MIT with Paul Krugman with whom he has co-authored several articles. He advises governments and international organisations around the world, and is the author of numerous books and articles on international trade, globalisation, regionalism, and European integration. His latest books are, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalisation, was published in November 2016 by Harvard University Press and The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work due to be published in Jan 2019 by Oxford University Press.

About the book

In this engagingly-written, insight-packed book, Richard Baldwin, one of the world’s leading thinkers on globalisation, argues that “globots” will build a better future, but will create explosive social challenges along the way. Digital technology is allowing “white-collar robots” to displace many service-sector workers and professionals while at the same time enabling “telemigration” where talented, low-cost workers sitting abroad displace domestic office workers.

If displaced office workers join with already displaced factory workers, the result could be a destabilising upheaval. To avoid this, Baldwin asserts that governments must use the tools they have slow the pace and make the competition from globots seem fairer.