Opinion: Companies are firing the wrong people

'We're seeing a slow-rolling catastrophe right now as trillions of dollars of human capital is being cut loose, ' says MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson. — Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

The coronavirus crisis will transform the global economy in ways that are hard to anticipate. Consider, for example, automation: As executives face difficult decisions about what to do with their workforces, might they opt for more machines over humans? And what will be the longer-term effect on employment, business and overall prosperity?

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spend a lot of their time thinking about such things. They have written three books together on how technologies such as artificial intelligence will change the nature of work and management. (Disclosure: They are also starting a consulting company, Second Machine Age Technologies.)