The last 15 years have brought what Stanford University professor Erik Brynjolfsson calls the "productivity paradox." While there's been continuing advances in technology, such as artificial intelligence, automation, and teleconferencing tools, the U.S. and other countries have seen flagging productivity. But a productivity boom is coming soon, Brynjolfsson said at the recent EmTech Next conference hosted by MIT Technology Review. He pointed to advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence programs that are as good as -- or better -- than humans at some things. Businesses should now focus on incorporating the technology into work processes and preparing employees, he said, and policymakers should make sure its adoption doesn't contribute to inequality.

Can artificial intelligence ever boost productivity of firms and industries the way the PC and ... [ ] networking did in the '80s and '90s? A big pastime of economists in the 1980s and 1990s was trying to gauge how much corporate and industrial productivity would benefit from the then-novel phenomena of personal computers, workgroup servers, and computer networking. At first it was hard to see, but in time, economists did indeed find evidence that information technology contributed to boosting economic productivity. It's too soon to expect to see data showing a similar boom from artificial intelligence, today's big IT revolution. The technology is just becoming industrialized, and many companies have yet to even try to use things such as machine learning in any significant way.

Can artificial intelligence ever boost productivity of firms and industries the way the PC and networking did in the '80s and '90s? A big pastime of economists in the 1980s and 1990s was trying to gauge how much corporate and industrial productivity would benefit from the then-novel phenomena of personal computers, workgroup servers, and computer networking. At first it was hard to see, but in time, economists did indeed find evidence that information technology contributed to boosting economic productivity. It's too soon to expect to see data showing a similar boom from artificial intelligence, today's big IT revolution. The technology is just becoming industrialized, and many companies have yet to even try to use things such as machine learning in any significant way.