The impact of artificial intelligence on macroeconomic productivity

Masayuki Morikawa in Vox EU:

With the rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI), its impacts on productivity and the labour market have attracted attention. Many studies have been conducted on the impacts of industrial robots on productivity (e.g. Graetz and Michaels 2018, Kromann et al. 2020, Cette et al. 2021, Dauth et al. 2021) due to the availability of International Federation of Robotics (IFR) data on robot utilisation by country and industry. However, the quantitative impact of AI on productivity is not yet well understood, mainly due to a lack of statistical data on the use of AI.

Recently, several studies have reported findings from randomised experiments on specific tasks in which AI has a large positive effect on productivity (e.g. Brynjolfsson et al. 2023, Kanazawa et al. 2022, Noy and Zhang 2023, Peng et al. 2023). These studies are valuable contributions that reveal the causal effect of AI on productivity, but it is impossible to infer macroeconomic impacts from these results because the studies only cover the very narrowly defined tasks of customer support, taxi driving, writing tasks, and software programming.

Acemoglu (2024) estimates the medium-term effect of AI on productivity in the US as the percentage of tasks affected by AI multiplied by task-level cost savings based on these existing task-level studies. According to his study, the macroeconomic impact of AI is non-negligible but small, with a cumulative total factor productivity (TFP) increase of less than 0.7%. However, he noted that there is huge uncertainty about which tasks will be automated, and what the cost savings will be.

More here.

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