“The technology is real, but the benefits take time to emerge,” he said.īrynjolfsson used to agree with other economists who attribute the current state of slow economic growth to partly a problem of mismeasurement - where intangible products like search engines and online transactions are not fully captured in balance sheets or the GDP.īut he says the findings of he and his colleagues have since shifted his perspective. Brynjolfsson points to the recurring lag in productivity growth for other breakthrough innovations - namely, the steam engine, electricity, the internal combustion engine, and computers.īrynjolfsson thinks AI holds the same promise as what Stanford economist Tim Bresnahan coined as a “general purpose technology” - a major innovation that spawns other advances.
“We're trying to reconcile some of the amazing things that are happening in technology - thanks to a 50-mile radius of where we are standing now - and why we’re not seeing it in productivity statistics,” Brynjolfsson said.īut a boom is coming, he said. Such concerns are not surprising given how incomes have stagnated, and the rate of productivity - a component of economic output and measure of innovation - has been stuck at about half of what it used to be from over a decade ago. The paradox of our era is that people are less confident about our future than ever, he said. But if AI is getting more ingrained in society, why has it not boosted economic growth - as technological innovations like electricity or computers have done in the past?Įrik Brynjolfsson, a leading economist in AI, says it’s only a matter of time.īrynjolfsson, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, spoke Tuesday at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), on “The AI Awakening and the Coming Productivity Boom.” The event was co-hosted by SIEPR and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), where Brynjolfsson is a distinguished fellow. No longer relegated to only outwitting humans in chess matches, AI now powers virtual assistants like Siri and self-driving cars testing their way through our neighborhoods. Artificial intelligence has come a long way in a short time.