Furthermore, AI is standing on the shoulders of giants in terms of previous recent major technologies, namely the internet (breakthrough 1995), smartphones (breakthrough 2007) and cloud (breakthrough 2012), which have driven very strong growth of the digital economy over the past quarter of a century: 825% cumulative growth in GDP of the digital economy between 1997 and 2022 compared with just 73% for the overall economy during the same period.
AI is a game changer
Growth of digital vs total economy 1997 – 2022 (US)
Game changing technology and key breakthrough year
This is important because leveraging these existing powerful technologies means that the productivity gains from AI could come quicker than from previous major technologies such as steam and electricity (which took decades to generate strong broad-based productivity gains), and could be larger given the potential to unlock as yet untapped value from these three previous giant digital breakthroughs.
