The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

From the first quarter of 1950 to the first quarter of 1990, real output per hour in the United States increased by an average of 0.55 percent per quarter.[87] As personal computers and the internet became widespread in the nineties, productivity gains accelerated. From the first quarter of 1990 to the first quarter of 2003, quarterly increases averaged 0.68 percent.[88] It appeared that the World Wide Web had unleashed a new age of rapid growth, and as late as 2003 there was a widespread expectation that this pace would continue.[89] Yet starting in 2004, productivity growth began to significantly slow. From the first quarter of 2003 to the first quarter of 2022, it averaged just 0.36 percent per quarter.[90] This has been one of the great economic mysteries of the past decade. With information technology transforming business in so many ways, we’d expect to see much stronger productivity growth. Theories abound as to why we haven’t. If automation is really having such a huge impact, there appears to be several trillion dollars of the economy “missing.” In my view, which has been growing in acceptance among economists, much of the explanation is that we don’t count the exponentially increasing value of information products in GDP, many of which are free and represent categories of value that did not exist until recently. When MIT bought the IBM 7094 computer I used as an undergraduate for around $3.1 million in 1963, that counted for, well, $3.1 million ($30 million in 20...