The steam engine, electric lighting, refrigeration. If you’re wondering what these things have in common, they’re examples of transformative technologies that lifted worker productivity, along with wages and economic output. Does generative AI belong on that list? Cue the debate.
Hardly a day passes without some news of the feats that so-called large language models (LLMs) can pull off, from helping to write academic papers or design buildings—along with projections on how many jobs will be wiped out as companies figure out ways to deploy the new technology. But economists are divided on whether the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard have the potential to jump-start productivity growth, which in Europe, the US and Japan has fallen by half since the 1980s.
