The AI boom: lessons from history

It can takeaigptgptgptaiaird a little imagination to see how some innovations might change an economy. Not so with the latest . It is easy—from a writer’s perspective, uncomfortably so—to think of contexts in which something like Chat, a clever chatbot which has taken the web by storm since its release in November, could either dramatically boost a human worker’s productivity or replace them outright. The in its name stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”, which is a particular kind of language model. It might well stand for general-purpose technology: an earth-shaking sort of innovation which stands to boost productivity across a wide-range of industries and occupations, in the manner of steam engines, electricity and computing. The economic revolutions powered by those earlier s can give us some idea how powerful might transform economies in the years ahead.In a paper published in 1995, Timothy Bresnahan of Stanford University and Manuel Trajtenberg of Tel Aviv University set out what they saw as the characteristics of a general-purpose technology. It must be used in many industries, have an inherent potential for continued improvement and give rise to “innovational complementarities”—that is, induce knock-on innovation in the industries which use it. is being adopted widely, seems to get better and is being deployed in ever more & contexts. So when does the economic revolution begin?