The Real Payoff From Artificial Intelligence Is Still a Decade Off
The robot revolution hasn’t started yet.
By Edoardo Campanella
It has been 21 years since IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer checkmated chess champion Garry Kasparov, marking a historic moment in the development of artificial intelligence technologies. Since then, artificial intelligence has invaded everyday objects, such as cell phones, cars, fridges, and televisions. But the world economy seems to have little to show for the proliferation of smartness. Among advanced economies, productivity growth is slower now than at any time in the past five decades. National GDPs and standards of living, meanwhile, have been relatively stagnant for years.
This situation poses something of a riddle: Previous waves of technical innovation have come with rising productivity and, in turn, leaps forward in economic growth and well-being. For example, once electricity became widespread in the United States in the 20th century, labor productivity started growing at an annual rate of 4 percent — almost four times higher than the current rate.
There are two schools of thought about today’s productivity puzzle. On the one hand are techno-pessimists, such as Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon, who believe that today’s technologies are the…
