Early studies of the effects of AI have found it can often lead to a 20 to 80 percent improvement in productivity across a wide variety of job types, from coding to marketing. By contrast, when steam power, that most fundamental of General Purpose Technologies, the one that created the Industrial Revolution, was put into a factory, it improved productivity by 18 to 22 percent. And despite decades of looking, economists have had difficulty showing a real long-term productivity impact of computers and the internet over the past twenty years.
