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Kandy Wong

Simon Johnson is a professor of entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he won a joint Nobel Prize for economics in 2024 for his research into how institutions shape national prosperity. On June 8, the British government announced Johnson as chair of its new AI Economics Institute.
In this interview, conducted on the sidelines of the UBS Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong, Johnson discussed the rise of artificial intelligence, the future of US-China competition, and how the technology poses unique challenges to both economies.
This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.
As your research focuses on AI, how do you expect AI to change the job market globally? Will the impact be positive or negative for human workers?
It is obviously very early in the process, so we do not know for sure yet. But what seems to be likely, call that the default, is that AI will replace a lot of people who currently have relatively routine tasks in all businesses.
This is going to affect a lot of people in the middle of organisations, including white-collar workers at the beginning of their careers, or in information processing or compliance. These sorts of tasks are definitely in the line of fire.
For example, as long as people have money to invest, then you are going to need some people in any banking organisation to manage those relationships. But when it comes to making decisions about where to deploy the money and other processing functions – preparing statements, customer service and making adjustments to people’s accounts – a lot of that can already be handled by AI.
Every company needs some high performers. You do need some people to manage relationships. But you may not need all the other people that you currently have in banking or other sectors. In a sense, it means that the number of people that you need is just fewer than before.
AI has two sides – of the same coin – and they are inseparable. One is automation, which means replacing people with algorithms. That means no more jobs for some people in existing functions. The other side of the coin is that AI will help create new tasks and new activities, and young people (and others) can go into these new activities that do not currently exist.
The question is: at what pace do we automate jobs compared to the pace at which we create new tasks for humans? It is early days to answer this question. However, what the preliminary evidence suggests is that the automation effect is bigger than new task creation.
The United States and China are competing fiercely in a range of hi-tech industries. Which side looks best positioned to win this race, and why?
The US is having a difficult moment because we are retreating from our investments in science, and we are cutting the number of graduate students and the amount of science that is created. That is really very important for future tasks in the job market.
Right now – during the second administration of US President Donald Trump – the flow of new science creation is down about 10 to 20 per cent in the US, which is heading in the wrong direction, by any measure. If the US wants to compete with China, we should be investing a lot more in science, not less.
This is obviously a dynamic conversation. There are many people on Capitol Hill who would agree with me that we should spend more on science. And Congress, in principle, does control the budget. But the administration is not on board with that, and their policies are unfortunately undermining the US.
The current focus on automation is probably a bit too extreme in China

What are your biggest concerns regarding AI development in China and the US?
The issue for China could be over-automation. Given the wage level in China and the number of people who want to have a job, including young people, it is not clear that you should have so much automation in manufacturing and the service economy.
The kind of automation that is being developed in the US and China makes sense for high-wage economies. Now, some parts of China are relatively high-wage, but a lot of China is not. So, if you bring high-wage technology to a medium or lower-wage place, what happens to the workers? This is an issue in some parts of the US, so China’s not alone on this.
The current focus on automation is probably a bit too extreme in China. If you had an expansion of China’s service economy and shifted away from a capital-intensive investment strategy, the market would take care of itself. Hong Kong is obviously very different from mainland China, with a much stronger service sector, and that is perhaps a lesson for the rest of China.
Regarding the US – I am British by origin and moved to the US 40 years ago to get my PhD. The population of the US has increased by 100 million since then – now, it’s almost 350 million people. The US has this ability to bring talented people from around the world – people who want to work hard – and plug them into a society that is fairly dynamic.
Foreign skilled labour is complementary to, not a substitute for, domestic labour. I am very happy to see more foreign-born people come to graduate schools – MIT and other places. That is the secret sauce of America. If we can continue to allow immigration at all levels, including graduate students and scientific inventors, then the US will do well. That is the key political choice.
Are US export controls effective tools for delaying China’s AI development? What else can the US do to compete with China?
Not really, no. I understand why export controls are deployed, and you can argue that in a particular moment it might have some value. But honestly, it just encourages China to develop technology that uses different kinds of chips and build their own chip industry. I do not think this will slow them down very much. I am not sure if it is helping China, but it is not substantially changing the terms of that competition.
The best way for the US to compete with China is to invest more in our own science and technology, which we are good at and we have excellent mechanisms for doing it. But we are cutting back for political reasons. That is a missed opportunity, and everything else is, I would say, a distraction.
We will see which of President Trump’s ideas and preferences last beyond him. Some of the China rhetoric that he has – sometimes he obviously changes back and forth – is excessive. But on Capitol Hill, where you have a much wider range of views, there are some positive responses to the competition from China. There is also probably too much anti-China rhetoric.
Unfortunately, the Americans and others have a tendency to blame their own home-grown problems on other people, like immigrants or China. It is not very healthy. Most of what we are grappling with in the US is about us. Most of it is about underinvestment in science and technology and not generating enough new jobs through those investments. The trade threat from China is significant, but it is not the main problem.


AI is bringing sweeping changes. What can people do to adapt to those changes?
The debate is evolving very quickly. People are beginning to understand the downside of this technology. The release or the pre-release of Claude Mythos in the US has made it clear that this technology – if it falls into the wrong hands – could do a lot of damage. For example, it could be used to break commercial-level cybersecurity, which could be a huge problem in many economies.
As for evolution, we are not yet changing the biology of humans. In that sense, humans have to learn to work with algorithms and computers in new ways. And some of those new ways will be hard to imagine.
I have written a science-fiction novel about this very problem, because I find economics is good for thinking about the situation today, yesterday, and a little bit tomorrow. But if you want to think out 25 years, then economics is not that useful. You have to imagine everything changing between technology, society, culture and economics.
Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, a lot of people have started to imagine different futures. Of course, science-fiction writers have been thinking about this for a long time, as have people who make sci-fi movies. The broader population is now out of the box. But the question is still struggling to get oriented.
There have been many predictions in recent years that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy. Do you think China is still on track to become the world’s No 1 economy, and how long will this process take?
I think we are talking about gross domestic product measured in terms of market exchange rates rather than purchasing power, because China is already very large in those terms. China has a good chance. It has 1.4 billion people, compared with 350 million people in the US. If China can come up to half of the American wage level, or GDP per capita, then it will surpass the US.
It is not baked in. It is not necessarily the outcome yet, because a lot depends on productivity and what happens in terms of productivity gain. The Americans will keep at it. The US could do better. We could accelerate, which we are not doing. And China is obviously pushing on.
The next 10 to 15 years will be quite decisive, because China has a demographic adjustment coming. The Chinese population has peaked and is coming down. A lot of young people in China need jobs. Whether they can get into a productive position in a hyperactive economy will be a very important variable for what happens subsequently.
We have seen other places that competed very effectively with the American model for a period, such as the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s, Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, and Europe more recently. What is interesting is that all those places had very different characteristics, and they are not the same as China.
They all went through a phase when they were running neck and neck with the Americans on frontier technologies, such as space technology, vehicles or aircraft. But none of them could stay the course.
It is actually not easy to run at the front of the pack. If you ride a bicycle, the person who rides at the front has to use more energy than the others behind them. Similarly, it is relatively easy, although not trivial, to be the country that slipstreams; that follows; that adopts the technology. And it is quite hard to be at the front of the technology pack and stay at the front, because that requires you to continue to renew your economy.
If you let some people and companies become big and successful, and stay there without being challenged, then they go to sleep and they do not remain innovative. That is what happened in these other economies. Only the US has been able to retain this level of dynamism.
The United Kingdom, where I was born, is a classic example. This was, by far, the most productive place in the world in the early 19th century. It lost that lead and is now substantially behind and needs to catch up.




What are the weaknesses of the Chinese economy? How will these weaknesses slow China’s progress in surpassing the US?
There is no secret that Chinese consumers are quite worried and do not spend enough money because they save a lot. They lost a lot of money on property. And the policy preferences are to encourage capital investment as opposed to encouraging consumer spending and supporting consumer financial security in a way that would be conducive to more robust consumption.
All these features have been with China for quite some time. When I was at the IMF in the early 2000s, we were talking about almost the same issue. But they are real issues and definite constraints.
Another key issue is over-automation. Where are the good jobs? Who is getting the good jobs? Do young people become discouraged? Do they drop out of the labour force or not pursue ambitious careers?
Industrial policy is an interesting topic. China has had some remarkable successes, including on infrastructure, energy and most spectacularly electric vehicles. This is an area where the US should be competing head to head with China, but we have retreated. So, China has a remarkable global opportunity.
There has been a set of policies in China that have encouraged overcapacity in lots of sectors. Obviously, President Trump threatened tariffs and Chinese President Xi Jinping countered with critical minerals and magnets. So that is a little bit of a stand-off.
It is not easy to sell even the best Chinese products at the scale that is desired around the world, because people want China to buy from them too. The trade has to flow both ways, but who is going to buy in China if the consumer is hampered and feels handicapped?
You have criticised Trump’s tariff policies. How are tariffs affecting the US economy?
The Trump tariffs, as they are called, have a number of fundamental problems. One is that they are illegal. We have laws about what rules can be imposed, including by the presidency. I signed an amicus brief – opinion provided by experts to the American courts – on the original Trump tariffs from 2025. The arguments in our expert brief said these tariffs are illegal and must stop.
Now, the Trump administration replaced those tariffs with another set of tariffs earlier this year, which in my view are also illegal and not consistent with the legislation. I signed an amicus brief to the Court of International Trade on that, and this is still going through the court system. It will also be appealed and will presumably go to the Supreme Court.
In addition to not being legal, these tariffs are also not a good idea because what you are essentially doing is putting a tax on your own consumers. And those consumers are often relatively low-income people in the US who shop at Walmart, for example, which sources a lot from mainland China and other places.
You are also putting a tax on your own companies that buy imported inputs. So, you are undermining their ability to manufacture in the US. The goal of the policy is to help manufacturers, but this kind of tax is completely counterproductive. You can offset it with various kinds of special privileges and exemptions, but that becomes extremely complicated.
It also opens the door to corruption. This is not specific to America; this is something that happens all around the world. When you get complicated tariff systems, you tend to have some political favours, some facilitation payments, some bureaucratic discretion. All of which is a complete mess, and not the right way to organise foreign trade.
Corruption is a standard feature of complicated trade systems. I am not saying we have seen direct evidence or court cases on this yet, but that is what we should expect. Even if it is not overtly corrupt, then it just makes investment much harder and less predictable. It discourages you from entering into long-lasting foreign trade relationships.
It is really the kind of policy that undermines job creation. The Trump administration says that they want job creation, but their policies are counterproductive in this case.
[We will have] more volatility than between 2010 and 2020, which was a relatively calm decade

Given the Trump administration’s tariff policies and the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, are we heading towards a recession?
There is always some risk of recession, and I do think the situation in the Strait of Hormuz is very dangerous. It is quite difficult for the US to resolve this situation by itself. I am writing about ways in which China could help with that.
But I do not think China is yet willing to play the kind of expansive role we are recommending, which would suggest that we will get a lot of instability and continued disruption through the Strait of Hormuz.
At the same time, Russia is playing quite a destructive role – not just in Ukraine, but also with regard to supplying Iran with drones. Remember, a lot of these drones were actually developed in Iran, sold to Russia, and now Russia has improved the design.
The Russians are the big winners from the Strait of Hormuz closure and the Iran war, because now they can sell more oil at a higher price. Before the invasion, they were selling at about US$60 a barrel. Now, they can sell at the full [global oil benchmark] Brent price between US$100 and US$110 per barrel. That is a big windfall for the Kremlin.
This kind of physical game is very bad for the global economy. It adds pressure on the central banks because of inflationary effects; it disrupts access to energy for a lot of economies, particularly the ones that do not have deep pockets or strategic reserves; it introduces uncertainty around investment.
There is also big tension within Nato about whether the US will continue to support it. I do think the US will try to acquire Greenland, and it may do that in ways that are not violent. This would send a not entirely peaceful and conducive signal to Russia and mainland China. These are big risks swirling around the global economy.
If a recession does come, how can the global economy bounce back?
There is a resilience to the global economy that is admirable. And the AI boom, as long as it lasts, will be helpful there.
At the same time, we should remember what happened during some historical episodes of big technological transformations. For example, railways did transform and boost the productivity of many economies, including the US. But in 1873, there was a big financial crash around railways, and a years-long depression over the following decade in the US.
So, even though the railways were profoundly transformative and very positive from the point of view of economic development, you can still have big bumps in the road around the deployment and valuation of new technology.
The world is a big place, and the world is quite resilient. There are definite tensions. But I do not see any reasons why the world economy would go down and stay down. The future is more about volatility, I would say, not recession. More volatility than between 2010 and 2020, which was a relatively calm decade.


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Trump and Xi will act tough but won’t allow ‘free fall’ in US-China ties: Ryan Hass

History tells us US-China ties will survive current rupture: Neysun Mahboubi

Students from the University of Pennsylvania visit the Hangzhou Longjing Tea Gardens during a 10-day visit led by their professor, Neysun Mahboubi. Photo: Handout

University of Pennsylvania’s Neysun Mahboubi and his students attend a workshop at the Fudan Centre for American Studies in Shanghai. Photo: Handout

YouTuber IShowSpeed, aka Darren Jason Watkins Jnr, attracted millions of views in China when he live-streamed his visit in March. Photo: YouTube/IShowSpeed

University of Pennsylvania’s Neysun Mahboubi and his students at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Photo: Handout

During their visit to China, Neysun Mahboubi and his students from the University of Pennsylvania visit the US embassy in Beijing. Photo: Handout

Future of Science and Technology Agreement is a bellwether for US-China ties: Denis Simon

Then Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping and US president Jimmy Carter in Washington on January 31, 1979, after signing the US-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement. Photo: VCG/Getty Images

Open QuestionsNobel laureate Simon Johnson on the AI race and China’s ‘over-automation’ problem

The Nobel Prize-winning economist discusses how AI is reshaping US-China competition – and poses unique challenges for both economies

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Nobel Prize-winning economist discusses how AI is reshaping US-China competition – and poses unique challenges for both economies

The Nobel Prize-winning economist discusses how AI is reshaping US-China competition – and poses unique challenges for both economies