There is also the possibility that AI may not deliver the goods that capital expects. The entire digital ‘information revolution’ has been bedevilled by the ‘productivity paradox’, a problem summed up in the sardonic observation by Robert Solow (1987) that ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Apart from a brief period at the end of the 1990s, widespread adoption of digital technologies in advanced capitalist economies has not (as of 2019) generated observable year over year productivity increases comparable with those yielded by earlier cycles of innovation. The reasons are hotly disputed. Some economists argue that this apparent anomaly reflects problems in measuring the real significance of digital activity, or that economic gains of digitization merely need more time to manifest (Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson 2017). Others, such as Robert Gordon (2016), insist that the economic consequences of information technology are simply much less than those of inventions such as the automobile, electricity, urban sanitation chemicals and pharmaceuticals that powered US economic growth from 1870 to 1970.
In the uneasy aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 2008, US corporate spending on new means of production, such as equipment and buildings, has been low, especially relative to the amount spent on financial and speculative activities such as dividends, stock buybacks and takeovers (Henwood 2018a). Michael Roberts (2018) proposes that ‘[p]roductivity growth in all the major capitalist economies has slowed because of the failure of capitalists in most economies to step up investment in new technologies’. This picture could be changed, either by dramatic falls in the cost of AI-related technologies, by massive state subsidization of AI infrastructures, or by the threat of wage demands emerging from gradually tightening post-recession labour markets, which would incentivize automation. But there is as yet no absolute guarantee that the current wave of new AI research will actually make it out of the laboratory and into a wide transformation of business practices: the AI revolution might subside with a digitally voiced whimper.
means of cognition
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