The New York Times Gift Article: “Pretty much everyone agrees that artificial intelligence has the potential to reshape the economy in the coming decades. But no one is sure what effect the technology is having right now. According to some measures, A.I. is contributing to high unemployment rates among new graduates and might already have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs. Other sources suggest companies might actually be adding workers as a result of the technology. A.I. might be contributing to the U.S. inflation problem, or part of the solution to it. It might be responsible for a recent pickup in productivity growth, or might be playing virtually no role — or the productivity boom itself might be a mirage. Researchers can’t even agree on basic questions like how many companies are using A.I. or which workers are most vulnerable to the disruptions it could cause. The conflicting signals partly reflect the challenge of detecting economic shifts in real time. Government statistics are inherently backward looking, and they are better at measuring broad trends than developments in specific sectors or regions. New technologies that might lead to the emergence of new products, jobs or entire industries can be particularly difficult to measure. What makes A.I. different is the speed of its spread through the economy. It has taken less than four years for generative A.I. to go from a novelty useful mostly for writing limericks to a powerful tool adopted by the world’s largest corporations. Economists have become convinced that the technology will have profound implications for workers and the economy, even as they disagree about what those implications will be. By the time the data is clear, they warn, it could be too late for policymakers to figure out how to respond. “The stakes are super high,” said Nathan Goldschlag, director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank. “Getting the policy right is going to depend on getting the measurement right. You can’t get the policy right if you don’t know what’s happening.”

Mr. Goldschlag on Thursday published a report documenting the challenge of A.I. measurement and proposing steps to improve it. He and other experts argue that the government and the private sector should be devoting more resources to the problem…”