Throughout history, specific technologies have revolutionized the way we live, work and play. This has often occurred gradually, but occasionally through dramatic, sweeping changes in society. The technology behind the industrial revolution -- the steam engine, the spinning jenny and the cotton engine, for example -- accelerated economic growth by an order of magnitude, creating an explosion of innovation that still reverberates around the planet.
By contrast, other technologies have had more modest impacts. The invention of electricity, cheap air travel, computing, and so on have all been important and revolutionary but the economic growth they allow has always been constrained by other factors that prevented the kind of explosive growth of the industrial revolution.
That raises an interesting question about the impact of artificial intelligence. This novel technology is currently taking the planet by storm, with no shortage of hype about its potential to change the nature of work. But will this revolution lead to explosive economic growth or will some other factor limit the ultimate impact that AI can have?
