Jeremy Warner could be a little stronger here:
And we all remember the famous Robert Solow observation about the computer: “You can see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”
The long, but persistent, decline in Western productivity growth can be dated almost exactly to the advent of the desktop computer and accompanying surge in corporate and household IT spending. As far as living standards are concerned, the computer appears to have been ineffectual.
Four primary reasons tend to be put forward for why this might be the case.
One is that the data simply doesn’t capture the gains being made because of the plethora of free stuff that is made available over the internet, and their failure to measure intangible benefits not before encountered.
A case in point would be access to virtually the entire body of human music ever recorded where once you would have had to go to an expensively priced live concert to hear just a tiny fraction of it.
It’s not just a possible explanation, it is that explanation. WhatsApp is where some 1 billion people get free telecoms. It appears in the GP accounts as a fall - yes, fall - in productivity and so something that makes us poorer. We have a measurement problem here.
On the other hand this is spot on:
But just because a technology becomes available, doesn’t mean it will be used.
Taking radiography by way of example, doctors first have to be convinced and apply their skills elsewhere. Resistance from vested interest among medical professionals is one thing. Introducing AI more widely into the public sector, where it is perhaps most urgently required, will encounter all kinds of Luddite-style opposition.
Quite so. It’s also fairly obvious. Few want to see their own comfortable little perch sawn off the branching tree of the economy. But that is indeed what all economic advance is about. Getting the machine to do the work and thereby destroying a human job.
No, the same technology does not then create more jobs. What actually happens is that that rare and scarce economic resource, human labour, can be applied to solving another desire or want. But first we’ve got to destroy the old jobs with the new technology so we can then experiment with what the labour then does.
All economic advance is predicated on destroying jobs.