The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group of 38 rich countries, said the future of the global economy was “brighter”. OECD economists cite a number of factors for the potential for higher growth rates. But what stands out is the rapid increase in the use of artificial intelligence to improve worker productivity.
The OECD provides several examples. People who write for a living and currently rely on AI are about 50% more efficient. A computer coder's efficiency increased by 60%.
Claire Lombardelli, the OECD's chief economist, said last week that the gains are “huge.” But they don't fully capture future benefits, she added, as the world begins to use AI to change “what we do and how we do it.” .
That's not all. Hopes that AI will increase per capita output could help counter widespread concerns that the future is held back by a “lack of ideas”, according to an April OECD report. The reason is that sufficiently innovative AI is starting to “trigger an acceleration of innovation.”
Companies that implement AI generate more patents and new products. In particular, Al enhances basic research by rapidly generating new hypotheses that lead to new inventions. This will enable researchers to “go beyond the low-hanging fruit of scientific discovery,” the OECD said. AI “has the potential to continually push the frontiers of productivity.”
Ideas are “unlike almost every other commodity in economics,” Charles Jones of the Stanford Economic Policy Institute said at a symposium last year. Unlike things or workers, ideas can be used by any number of people “infinitely,'' so they have no rivals.
“In the long run, improvements in living standards are determined by an increase in the number of people around the world who are looking for ideas,” he said. That number is determined by available talent, investment levels, migration patterns, and the size of the world's population. The potential for AI to drive growth is “probably the most uncertain, but also the biggest upside,” he added.
“Artificial intelligence appears to be a new general-purpose technology, perhaps on par with or even surpassing electricity and semiconductors,” he said.
AI has plenty of potential to be misused, but it's at least starting to change the way the world thinks about sources of inspiration. Or, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer put it, “We don't consistently know how many ideas remain undiscovered.”
