The rapid growth and market power of superstars causes complex challenges for society and governments, leading to increased antitrust enforcement, fines, and increased regulation. The reactions by markets and regulators is the primary reason why superstars in one business cycle are knocked out of the top decile by the next business cycle, which was confirmed by McKinsey & Company's research on superstar firms. Given these headwinds, it will become increasingly difficult for superstar firms to maintain a similar growth rate moving forward, providing an opportunity for competitors. In addition, tens of billions of dollars of investment in AI research and development over the last decade has resulted in sharply lower cost of adoption with much higher performance levels, opening the option for most organizations to adopt advanced AI systems.

As the coronavirus has swept across the globe, the swathes of redundancies that have followed in its wake have relegated the "robots are taking our jobs" narrative into the background. It was a narrative with a somewhat mixed logic at the best of times. For instance, research from the London School of Economics (LSE) found that the introduction of industrial robots has actually increased wages for employees while also increasing the number of job opportunities for highly skilled people. The researchers conducted a comprehensive analysis of the economic impact of industrial robots over 17 countries between 1993 and 2007 across 14 different industries. The period of analysis corresponded with a huge rise in the use of industrial robots, with the price of such machinery also falling by approximately 80%.

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.

BILL GATES is an unlikely Luddite, however much Microsoft may have provoked people to take a hammer to their computers. Yet in a recent interview with Quartz, an online publication, he expressed scepticism about society's ability to manage rapid automation. To forestall a social crisis, he mused, governments should consider a tax on robots; if automation slows as a result, so much the better. It is an intriguing if impracticable idea, which reveals a lot about the challenge of automation. In some distant future robots with their own consciousnesses, nest-eggs and accountants might pay income taxes like the rest of us (presumably with as much enthusiasm).