Two consultancies have independently reported that artificial intelligence will add to global GDP.

Accenture reckons AI will boost industry profits by 38% and add $14 trillion in annual gross value added (a metric that shows the contribution of different sectors to economic growth) to the economies of 12 countries. (Full report here.)

This will be driven by automation, augmentation of labour and capital, and by improved diffusion of innovation.

Annual growth rates of gross value added. Source: Accenture & Frontier Economics

Consultancy PwC came to similar conclusions reckoning that by 2030, global GDP would increase by $15.7trn due to the positive impact of AI, and that GDP would essentially be 14% higher because of the technology’s contribution. (That is more than the economies of India and China.)

MSCI boss, Henry Fernandez, argues that automation of stock-picking and a move to passive investing will be good for society:

Passive investing is another technological advance. It will free up resources to focus on less-efficient markets such as real estate, infrastructure and private debt. This will be good for society.

Software development won’t be exempt from the advances in automation (in fact, it’s an early candidate, as I discussed with Danny Lange in a recent podcast). Last week, a startup that spun out of Oxford University, DiffBlue, raised £17m to develop AI systems to automate development.

The startup claims to “understand” code, meaning it can carry out coding tasks considered too repetitive and boring for human developers.

Several new categories of human jobs will emerge.

As Paul Daugherty writes in Sloan Management Review the jobs AI will create in the short-term are:

Trainers (who train AI systems);

Explainers (who explain what a black-box AI system is doing);

Sustainers (who will ensure systems work as well as planned).

Carlos Espinal, comments on the above argument. The future is uncertain because:

there is some risk that AI might just be able to crack that Turing Test across the board and leaving us totally jobless.. unless it doesn’t, leaving us humans ‘safe’ to deal with jobs that are classically in the realm of what we consider ‘human’: creative jobs, empathy-centric jobs, ethics-centric jobs, and lastly jobs where discerning the fine line between good data from the bad data is critical.

Leader in the AI-first world 🇨🇳

I reckon that China stands to gain significantly from the arrival of AI and that China is well-placed to make significant breakthroughs in developing artificial general intelligence. US policy makers are starting to worry about this too.

My argument is established on four basic pillars:

Research & talent. China is producing more AI papers than any other country. While their impact trails both the U.S. and U.K., that gap may close. Data and platforms: China has several world-leading consumer internet platforms, such as WeChat, used by about a billion people. This creates a world-class set of data unburdened by even lax American views of privacy, let alone Europe’s more stringent take. Regulation: As we approach more powerful AI systems, governments will try to regulate things like privacy and bias. Chinese researchers may face a less meticulous environment: It was a more laissez-faire approach to regulation that helped China to bring the first commercial gene therapy product to market in 2003. Culture: More than two-thirds of Chinese believe AI will have a positive impact on society and on themselves. Less than half of Americans do.