The United States has recently increased after a long slower growth period. It is calculated roughly by dividing the gross domestic product by working hours. If we can get more economic growth of the same amount of work, this generally means that wages increase – without causing inflation.
Most big jumps in the standard of living We have seen throughout the story that have been motivated by productivity jumps: the introduction of the steam engine, electricity, computers – all this brought booms of productivity. And many economists hope that what we see at the moment could be the beginning of another, motivated by artificial intelligence.
Productivity has increased by 2.7% last year, according to the Labor Department. It is well above the 1 to 1.5% that we have on average since the first aughts and approaching the levels we saw in the last boom in the 1990s.
Two economists made a friendly bet a few years ago on the way productivity will increase this decade. Erik Brynjolfsson and Robert Gordon recorded their bet on the prediction website Paris Longs. The stakes are $ 400.
“But I think it’s more a reputation bet,” said Brynjolfsson, who is a professor at Stanford, where he heads the digital economy laboratory. He is optimistic about productivity.
His own research on customer service agents who began to use a large IA language model have shown that their productivity has improved up to 34%. And Other recent studies On the development of software, commercial advice, writing and sales have shown similar results.
“These are the biggest gains I have ever seen,” said Brynjolfsson. “I mean, seeing two -digit gains just in a few months is almost unknown.”
In the other corner: Robert Gordon, professor at Northwestern and author of “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”.
“It will not be a revolution,” said Gordon about AI. “It will not blow human nature. I think everything is very exaggerated.”
He thinks that AI will increase productivity, but not in the transformative way that electricity or computers have done. It has highlighted the last 20 years of modest gains, despite high -tech innovations ranging from smartphones to the economy of applications.
“These things are really minor compared to the difference they have made to have trucks instead of horses, to have planes instead of trains,” said Gordon, who doubts that the share of AI tasks can currently automate in the workplace to considerably move the needle in the wider economy.
For the moment, Brynjolfsson has started in mind, although it is not yet clear if the bump of the productivity that we see is proof of the start of a boom of sustainable AI.
Joseph Briggs looked for signs. He is the main economist of Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research.
“If we look at a base on the economy level, the impacts still seem quite negligible,” he said.
Goldman Sachs has planned that once generative AI has been largely adopted, it could increase productivity in the United States by 15% over 10 years.
Briggs monitors the labor market signals which would indicate that the adoption of AI would slow down employment growth. He sees limited evidence in certain industries such as IT programming, customer service, management consultancy and legal services, where AI has been adopted more aggressively.
But Briggs thinks that it will take a few years for AI to appear in federal productivity data. Goldman Sachs estimates only about 6% of American companies use technology.
“You must restructure workflows, you must have workers at ease to use it, and all of these things take time,” said Briggs.
However, they see many evidence that companies make major investments in AI, especially in industries such as law.
Annie Datesh is the director of innovation at the Silicon Valley law firm, Wilson Sonini, who works with a lot of technological startups. Business developed an AI tool To help examine the Cloud Services agreements, many technological companies frequently need.
“You negotiate them a lot. It would be a high volume, but a standard form, and suddenly automation and AI are starting to make sense,” she said.
Wilson Sonini uses AI, trained on its own practices, to personalize the agreements. Then a human lawyer examines and finalizes them.
Technology should possibly help the business serve more customers, faster. But it is not yet quite there.
“Well, think about when you hire a new person, right?” said Datesh. “They will always slow you down at first, but then they are formed, then they can take control of the tasks.”
Right now, she said, AI is always a bit green. “And so you watch it and supervise it as if it was this new person, which will theoretically slow you down.”
It is a model that you often see when a new powerful technology diffuses through the economy said that Brynjolfsson de Stanford – At first, it seems that nothing happens, until suddenly productivity Remove what he calls a curve J.
“With the steam engine, with electricity, with the internal combustion engine, when we have measured this, it has often taken literally decades,” he said. “It took about 30 years to electricity to really have its full gain.”
Brynjolfsson expects AI to offer productivity advantages much faster, because it does not require specialized equipment or skills to use. He obtained until 2029 to win the bet.
Roberts in Northwestern said he was still skeptical, but he would be happy to be wrong.
“I am happy for the economy if AI surprises me, because we don’t all want more growth?” He said.
However: if a boom in AI productivity Be necessarily a victory for most workers? That they are not so safe.
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