Nobel laureate in economics: AI won not restore era of rapid growth

A Nobel laureate in economics warned in a comment to Bloomberg that artificial intelligence will not return Western economies to an era of rapid productivity growth — it appears that period has remained in the past irretrievably.

What the warning is about

According to the economist, betting on artificial intelligence as a technology capable of repeating the explosive productivity growth of past decades is not advisable. This refers to periods when developed economies recorded consistently high rates of labor productivity growth — for example, the post-war decades or the information technology boom of the late twentieth century. In the economist's assessment, this era has probably ended definitively, and the current wave of AI will not resurrect it.

Why the thesis sparks debate

The conversation about whether artificial intelligence can give the economy a boost of comparable magnitude has been ongoing among economists for several years. Skeptics point to the so-called "productivity paradox": new technologies — from electrification to personal computers — for years did not show up in growth statistics before companies truly learned to reorganize their business processes around them. Optimists, by contrast, point to the rapid spread of generative AI in companies and expect the effect to accumulate with a lag of several years.

In the meantime, major technology companies continue to invest tens of billions of dollars in data centers and models, betting that the productivity effect will still materialize — just later than the boldest forecasts predicted.

What this means

The warning highlights the gap between investment hype around AI and the still unclear impact of the technology on real macroeconomic indicators — a question being raised not only by skeptics, but also by laureates of prestigious economic awards.