Survey finds only a quarter of US firms use AI

The Economist's @econcallum explains why AI still isn't delivering an economic boom, with only 25% of US businesses using it and a critical labor-market shift still missing: "The Census Bureau does the best survey of AI use in American businesses. It’s like 25% of businesses. If we’d sat here in 2023 and said, ‘In late 2026, how many businesses will be using AI?’ Most people would have said pretty much all of them, and it’s now 25%." "You’re gonna have to see AI creating new types of jobs and eliminating other forms of jobs. That’s what you see with all periods of strong productivity growth." "Fewer people than basically ever are being let go or being reallocated from one job to another. As a leading indicator, you want to see labor market reallocation, but that’s not even happening…

FULL INTERVIEW: The Economist's Callum Williams says only about 25% of American businesses use AI four years in, when most people in 2023 would have bet on nearly all of them. Ask CFOs what AI has done for their bottom line, and he says it "basically balances to zero." @econcallum is the senior economics writer at @TheEconomist. He joined @theojaffee and @schisofrenia to lay out why AI hasn't changed the economy yet and the signal he's watching for: 00:50 why AI hasn't changed the economy yet 01:38 why AI spread slower than the internet in business 03:05 why a laptop and ChatGPT isn't enough 04:20 the CFO surveys where AI's impact balances to zero 04:49 why cost will decide how fast AI spreads 06:11 the 25% stat, and the labor market signal he's watching 08:30 whether AI layoffs are real…

The Economist's @econcallum argues that anyone expecting AI to transform the economy in just 4 years is ignoring a fundamental lesson from history: "The history of new technologies is that they take a very long time to diffuse across the economy. This was true for electricity, it was true for the internet, it was true for tractors in American agriculture, which took 50 years really to be used in a serious way in farms." "If you have even a fairly rudimentary grasp of history, you would be entirely unsurprised that four years into the generative AI world, not much has changed." @TheEconomist

The Economist's @econcallum calls out economists who predicted robots would replace workers during COVID, only to be proven wrong and move on to predicting AI will take everyone's jobs: "During the pandemic, there was a strong body of economists who were like, ‘All those people who got laid off during the lockdowns are not gonna get their jobs back. Companies are gonna use a robot instead.’ Lo and behold, by early 2021, there was an unprecedented labor shortage in the US." "None of these people that had gone around the TED Talks making all these blood-curdling predictions ever came back and were like, ‘Oh, sorry, I really screwed up here.’ They just moved on to the next thing, which was predicting that AI was gonna take everyone’s job." "You should be somewhat skeptical of these kinds of…