This photograph taken on Feb. 3 shows workers at agritech startup Niqo Robotics, riding a tractor with AI-powered spot sprayer at a testing facility on the outskirts of Bengaluru. AFP-Yonhap

LONDON – Everyone knows that artificial intelligence is a hugely powerful technology with immense economic implications. U.S. equity prices reflect not only confidence in the prospects of technology companies but also a belief that AI will fuel a broader boom. The growth-obsessed U.K. government views AI development as a top priority, and everyone at the World Economic Forum in Davos this January wanted to hear from the world’s AI leaders.

We have been here before. In the 1960s, computers were too enormous and expensive to be used by anyone but the largest government agencies and businesses. Yet so great were concerns about “automation” that U.S. President Lyndon Johnson launched an inquiry into the danger that computer-based technologies might “eliminate all but a few jobs.” It wasn’t to be. By the 1970s, there was no sign of a productivity surge, and fears of mass technological unemployment subsided.

Personal and business computer use then soared in the 1980s; but by 1990, as the economist Robert Solow famously observed, Information Technology (IT) was “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” With mobile phones, the internet, ever-expanding hardware capacity, and growing software capabilities promising a new........

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