Ummm....because the real payoff is the friends we make along the way?
No?
Okay, here's James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, July 22:
Alas, all you tech-optimists, the artificial intelligence revolution
is seemingly everywhere except in the economic statistics. That’s the
downbeat conclusion from JPMorgan strategists, who have scoured the
macro data for green shoots of a big-time productivity revolution—and come up empty-handed. For now, the ChatGPT era is more show than substance.
“If large long-term productivity effects of AI are in fact realized,”
they write, “we believe that they largely lie ahead of us.”
To gauge what may come, the authors sensibly look to what came
before. The late-1990s IT boom remains the most instructive precedent.
Between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, American labor productivity
surged to three percent per year, nearly double the pace of the prior
decade and a half. The biggest early winners were the tech companies
themselves: Productivity in the computer and electronics sector soared
to 21 percent annually in the five years ending 1999, while the data
processing and internet sector clocked in at 13 percent by the
mid-2000s.
Crucially, during the IT boom, productivity gains in tech-producing
sectors led the broader economy by several years. But so far, the
evidence is underwhelming that the clock is even ticking on such a
timeline today.
Productivity growth in AI-heavy industries like software and computer
systems design has been “quite modest,” the analysts conclude. And
while investment in data centers is ramping up, there has been no echo
of the 1990s boom in private nonresidential investment, which climbed
from 11.2 percent to 14.7 percent of GDP in less than a decade:
In our view, it is reasonable to expect a similar run-up in
investment as AI tools are developed and deployed, though any such
increase is not yet clear at the macroeconomic level based on [US
private non-residential investment as a share of GDP].
The bank also offers a cautious note on what to expect if a productivity acceleration does actually emerge (bold by me):
It is, however, not a foregone conclusion that AI will in fact
deliver large long-term productivity gains. Important changes in the
ways in which people work do not always show up in the national economic
accounts. There is, indeed, still much debate about its potential. More
optimistic views are typically grounded in the predictions of
technologists and theoretical economic research. However, nascent
empirical economic research is far from emphatic, with some research
finding that productivity gains are likely to be quite modest. At the
low end of the spectrum, Acemoglu (2024) argues that total factor
productivity (cf. labor productivity) gains could amount to 0.66% over
10 years. Haskel argues that a broader approach to the question
indicates larger labor productivity gains of 0.7% per annum....
