Becker Brown Bag: Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox

We live in an age of paradox. In a wide variety of industries, artificial intelligence matches or surpasses human performance, leveraging rapid advances in technologies and driving soaring stock prices. Yet overall productivity has declined by half over the past decade, and income has stagnated since the late 1990s for a majority of Americans. What are the explanations for this productivity paradox? Is there a resolution?

In his Becker Brown Bag talk, Chad Syverson, the Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics at the Chicago Booth School of Business, discussed his recent research, “Artificial Intelligence and the Modern Productivity Paradox: A Clash of Expectations and Statistics,” which examines this complex phenomenon.