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Could AI be the next big thing without impacting the economy and labour market?
Computers revolutionized the construction industry. CAD software makes it far easier to draw buildings and share the drawings. Phones makes communications vastly easier. Instead of a worker getting stuck or having to physically find someone they can make a video call. Manuals and documents are freely available online. Online shopping makes order parts cheaper and easier while allowing builders to press prices. Accounting, scheduling, recruiting sales and other supporting activities are easier with computers. Even on the construction site computers control machines. A modern truck is full of software.
Yet the productivity in the construction industry has flat lined and is if anything declining. Land prices can take some blame but renovating a building has not become cheaper.
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
Some of programs are surprisingly quite limited. Chat GPT cannot download videos off youtube for example. Or remove text from images. Some random website can do it, but not 'state of the art' AI. Instead it shows a guide on how to do it with python . So basically it's like google, instead of actually automating said task. It also runs into meager data usage limits when performing computations , like trying to to solve 4x4 systems of equations (it will run into limitations when trying to solve more 4 of these matrices in 5-10 minute interval), and makes mistakes with other operations such as complex logarithms. Again, crappy websites can do this without limitations. It excels at rewriting and text though. For a free program it's not bad, but does not live up to the hype either. So I think it may not be the economic gamechanger as some expect.
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