Central Bank of Chile October 2019  Third Statistics Conference: “Measuring the Economy in the Digital Age” Opening remarks by Mario Marcel, Governor of the Central Bank of Chile October 1-2, 2019 – Santiago, Chile Good morning, It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the Third Statistics Conference organized by the Central Bank of Chile (CBC), on “Measuring the Economy in the Digital Age” that brings together distinguished experts on macro statistics from many agencies and countries around the globe. This conference follows the one on “Statistics for Financial and Monetary Analysis” in 2015 and on “Measuring the Economy in a Globalized World” in 2017 and it is becoming a landmark event for the CBC, and I hope for all participants as well. The conference we are opening today will address the opportunities and challenges that digitalization imposes on us in interpreting and analyzing increasingly dynamic economic and financial phenomena. The Digital Economy Digitization is progressively changing the way we understand our world, by creating new business models and processes, generating new smart products and services, with lower costs and more timely delivery, all of which is reshaping consumer behavior. Major questions are emerging about the ability of our conventional toolkit to measure economic activity in the face of such changes. Digital products, services and means of economic interaction are making the task of identifying economic phenomena more challenging, especially for economic and financial statistics. Traditionally, economic transactions were governed by the interaction between producers and households.

43  12  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  12  Typically, the two sides of this argument are taken to be in a secular struggle: the dark forces of secular stagnation pitted against the dynamic forces of secular innovation. Yet in practice, both arguments have merit. They are certainly not mutually incompatible. It is perfectly possible to imagine a world of rapid innovation which nonetheless leaves large swathes of society in its slipstream. More than that, recent research suggests this is a likely outcome of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. There are good conceptual grounds for thinking the displacement effects of the Fourth Industrial Revolution may be larger than ever-previously. Every industrial revolution has resulted in a hollowing-out, typically of mid-skilled tasks. Historically, that has meant largely manual, labour-intensive tasks. Machine has replaced human in activities that are routine and repetitive. The future could well be very different. For example, the dawning of AI means that humans will no longer have the cognitive playing field to themselves. Thinking or non-routine tasks may increasingly be taken up by machines. They will be able to process more quickly, more cheaply and with fewer errors than their human counterpart, at least in some activities. That could make the hollowing-out of human tasks, now cognitive as well as manual, far greater than ever before. 48  A cottage industry has emerged over recent years manufacturing estimates of job loss that might result from 49  this rise of the robots.