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Every transformative technology arrives with a paradox: it promises to lift everything, and then it takes longer than promised, with more disruption than promised, before the gains arrive — and they arrive unevenly even then. AI is unlikely to break the pattern.
Steam took 100 years to fully restructure the British economy. Electricity took 40 years to show up in productivity statistics — the famous Solow paradox. The internet's productivity bump was muted for two decades after commercial deployment. The current question isn't whether AI is transformative but whether the transition produces its own crisis — labor displacement, financial bubbles, geopolitical fracture — before the prosperity story plays out.
