Both last year’s Productivity Commission’s figures and Treasury’s in the Intergenerational Report this week promise enough benefits from AI to roughly maintain the status quo, but not so profound an improvement that you might start to worry life will be completely different in 2046 than it is today.

And since AI large language models are infinitely replicable, immortal and potentially much cheaper to keep running than a human being is, we can expect smarter-than-human AI to totally transform the economy, society, democracy and life as we know it. At the very least, it could be expected to replace knowledge workers like accountants, academics, public servants and, yes, think tank researchers and directors.

AI models are improving apace, but they are already brilliant: Solving mathematical problems, creating images that pass for human-made art and making more accurate predictions of the future than even expert forecasters do. I know computer programmers with decades of experience who swear that an off-the-shelf large language model is a better coder than they are.

But for all their awesome power, existing AI models have so far had little observable effect on employment or the wider economy. Some early corporate adopters have even........

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