Last Friday night, I attended the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 85th Anniversary Dinner.
The party was held at the American Museum of Natural History, where Seth Meyers, the former Saturday Night Live star, hosted the evening beneath a massive, life-sized replica of a blue whale.
It was a great honor to be asked by Bloomberg and BusinessWeek to give an official toast during the event, along with my fellow toastmasters Henry Kissinger, Henry Kravis, and Melody Hobson. For my toast, I was asked to select the innovation that I thought created the most disruptive change during the last 85 years.
I decided to speak about the microchip—because the microchip may well replace the human race.
Yes, I’m being intentionally provocative here: but it isn’t just because of my nickname (“Dr. Doom”) that I’ve chosen to find the dark shadow in the silver lining of technical progress.
A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking, the greatest astrophysicist of our time, gave a provocative speech of his own: Hawking suggested that humans should start thinking about colonizing other planets, because eventually artificial intelligence and robots will replace the human race.
It may sound crazy now—but what seems crazy today may not sound so crazy 25, 50, or 100 years from now.
Nouriel Roubini is an American professor of Economics at New York University`s Stern School of Business and chairman of RGE Roubini Global Economics
