The role AI played in job losses at Australia’s NAB, Qantas, Canva and Atlassian is far from clear – but it may prove to have more impact on the stock market than the jobs market

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In 1987, the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Solow remarked: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” At the time, computers had been around for 40 years. Real productivity gains did emerge in the 1990s after the arrival of the internet, but they were short-lived.

Four years after the launch of ChatGPT, the pattern seems to be much the same: lots of hype and excitement but with very little productivity growth. The main economic impacts, as in the 1990s dotcom era, have been a stock market boom and huge investment in infrastructure (fibre optics then, datacentres today), betting on future demand that has yet to emerge.