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Andrej Karpathy said that major revolutions like the Internet, smartphones, and AI often don’t show up clearly in GDP statistics, even when they radically change how people work. GDP measures total spending, not productivity or usefulness. These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life, but GDP mostly continued along its long-term trend.

See his interview in Dwarkesh's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0-0gGdDJyE&t=4983s

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"These revolutions improved efficiency and quality of life"

I'm genuinely not sure. We are all computer people in this forum, so it may have improved our lives. But for many people, information technology has lessened the time spent in a given week or year on activities they find meaningful.

True. The point remains the same. GDP isn’t measuring “meaningfulness,” and it also doesn’t measure “stress” very well either. Tech can change daily life massively in either direction without moving GDP much.

Besides, AI has barely started to be productive to Developers. The rest of the workforce are still untouched for the most part. The tools that assist the bulk of knowledge work out there is still in the works.

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