Six years ago, I expressed some optimism that policymakers were starting to meet the challenge of ensuring that digital markets worked for the benefit of consumers. After all, in 2019, three major jurisdictions—the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom—had all published landmark reports on digital competition and were moving toward legislation and enforcement.
But my optimism proved to be misplaced, because digital technology would soon leap ahead with the arrival of generative AI, which was made available to the public in the form of ChatGPT in late 2022. These new tools pose entirely different policy challenges, ranging from the huge scale barriers to market entry (given the investment requirements) to the explosion of toxic content online.
Nonetheless, my central argument from 2020 still stands. Like previous waves of digital technology, AI poses a challenge to economic analysis. Economists disagree widely when it comes to AI’s likely impact on jobs and productivity, the implications for business organization, and questions of how to analyze the convergence of competition, trade, industrial, and security policies. What was true six years ago remains true today. The onus is on the economics profession to equip policymakers for the impending transformation.
But my optimism proved to be misplaced, because digital technology would soon leap ahead with the arrival of generative AI, which was made available to the public in the form of ChatGPT in late 2022. These new tools pose entirely different policy challenges, ranging from the huge scale barriers to market entry (given the investment requirements) to the explosion of toxic content online.
Nonetheless, my central argument from 2020 still stands. Like previous waves of digital technology, AI poses a challenge to economic analysis. Economists disagree widely when it comes to AI’s likely impact on jobs and productivity, the implications for business organization, and questions of how to analyze the convergence of competition, trade, industrial, and security policies. What was true six years ago remains true today. The onus is on the economics profession to equip policymakers for the impending transformation.
– Diane Coyle, August 2026Just within the past few decades, digital technology has transformed the global economy and societies worldwide multiple times. In the 1980s, the automation of manufacturing produced waves of outsourcing and offshoring. In 1989, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and beginning around 2007, a confluence of smartphones, 3G/4G, and new algorithms brought much of the world’s population online, where we have been living ever since.