Each time fears of AI-driven job losses flare up, optimists reassure us that artificial intelligence is a productivity tool that will help both workers and the economy. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella thinks autonomous AI agents will allow users to name their goal while the software plans, executes and learns across every system. A dream tool — if efficiency alone was enough to solve the productivity problem. History says it is not. Over the past half-century we have filled offices and pockets with ever-faster computers, yet labour-productivity growth in advanced economies has slowed from roughly 2 per cent a year in the 1990s to about 0.8 per cent in the past decade. Even China’s once-soaring output per worker has stalled. The shotgun marriage of the computer and the internet promised more than enhanced office efficiency — it envisioned a golden age of discovery. By placing the world’s knowledge in front of everyone and linking global talent, breakthroughs should have multiplied. Yet research productivity has sagged. The average scientist now produces fewer breakthrough ideas per dollar than their 1960s counterpart. What went wrong? As economist Gary Becker once noted, parents face a quality-versus-quantity trade-off: the more children they have, the less they can invest in each child. The same might be said for innovation. Large-scale studies of inventive output confirm the result: researchers juggling more projects are less likely to deliver breakthrough innovations.

Full opinion : AI is just another productivity tool and the productivity gains will be limited; for lasting economic expansion, AI must catalyze new industries and initiatives.