A.I. Is Reshaping the Economy. Good Luck Measuring How.
Pretty much everyone agrees that artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape the economy in the coming decades.But no one is sure what effect the technology is having right now.According to some measures, A.I.
is contributing to high unemployment rates among new graduates and might already have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs.Other sources suggest companies might actually be adding workers as a result of the technology.A.I.
might be contributing to the U.S.inflation problem, or part of the solution to it.
It might be responsible for a recent pickup in productivity growth, or might be playing virtually no role — or the productivity boom itself might be a mirage.Researchers can’t even agree on basic questions like how many companies are using A.I.or which workers are most vulnerable to the disruptions it could cause.The conflicting signals partly reflect the challenge of detecting economic shifts in real time.
Government statistics are inherently backward looking, and they are better at measuring broad trends than developments in specific sectors or regions.New technologies that might lead to the emergence of new products, jobs or entire industries can be particularly difficult to measure.What makes A.I.
different is the speed of its spread through the economy.It has taken less than four years for generative A.I.
to go from a novelty useful mostly for writing limericks to a powerful tool adopted by the world’s largest corporations.Economists have become convinced that the technology will have profound implications for workers and the economy, even as they disagree about what those implications will be.
By the time the data is clear, they warn, it could be too late for policymakers to figure out how to respond.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subsc...