Artificial intelligence may not do much to boost productivity – and could end up widening the income gap between owners of capital and workers.titled"The Simple Macroeconomics of AI," Daron Acemoglu, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that predictions AI will improve productivity and
Acemoglu is skeptical, noting that prior introductions of automation through robotics benefited business owners and managers while workers experienced more negative outcomes.last year that estimated about 20 percent of US workers could have half of their jobs done by an LLM, Acemoglu estimates that AI can save 27 percent in labor costs, or 14.4 percent in overall costs."This calculation implies that total factor productivity effects within the next ten years should be no more than 0.
But even that figure may be too optimistic, he argues, because productivity estimates come from automating"easy tasks" – future tasks may be more complicated and less amenable to automation. He therefore contends there will be a more modest increase in TFP and GDP in the next ten years – on the order of 0.53 percent and 0.90 percent, respectively.
Acemoglu goes on to argue that AI is unlikely to significantly improve wages and that even if the technology improves the productivity of low-end and middle-performing workers, it may not reduce inequality.