AI is impressive, but productivity boost is overestimated, MIT professor finds

A new study by MIT Professor of Economics Daron Acemoglu finds that AI will offer no more than a 0.71% increase in economic productivity over the next decade. Acemoglu joins Market Domination Overtime to discuss how he quantified AI's impact on economic growth and the technology's distributional effects.
"There is a big achievement here ... but when you look at the data, most of the things that humans do these models still cannot do," Acemoglu highlights. About 4.5% of the tasks American workers complete may be impacted directly by AI, and taken together with the productivity improvements these models can currently deliver, "you end up with productivity of less than 1% of GDP," Acemoglu explains.
The distributional effects of AI are "not huge," the professor notes, adding that society won't see massive job loss in the next 10 years. That's because occupations impacted by AI are more evenly distributed across geography and economic groups than those jobs "impacted by robots." Still, Acemoglu states that AI will likely increase the gap between capital and labor, "helping capital owners and managers more than workers."

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