Four Years Into the AI Boom, Why Does Nothing Feel Different?
Critics argue AI has sped up individual tasks without lifting the economy as a whole.
The night ChatGPT launched, the office felt moments away from being handed to the machines. Four years on, the only thing that's multiplied is the number of open chat windows. Matt Scherer of the Open Markets Institute names the awkward fact: on corporate balance sheets, AI has barely left a mark.
He splits "productivity" down the middle. Individual keystrokes are faster; the economy as a whole has barely budged. AI behaves like a polished ghostwriter — smoother sentences, same old book.
Then come its byproducts: spam copy, confident hallucinations, an endless churn of sameness. When the tool starts digesting its own output, "efficiency" is just a local illusion. The next four years won't be measured in words written, but in whether anything truly new gets done.