Mary Daly

What am I seeing?

And so right now, while we can't find it in the macro studies that would do very sophisticated empirical econometrics and ask the questions, how much of this is AI, we still can see that there's something going on there.

The question isn't, is it happening?

The question is, how long will it persist?

And so clearly, something's happening in the economy.

But if you make a series, to go back to your question about productivity, if you make a series of one-time adjustments, so say you automate a production line, or you use AI to help in loan application process.

You save money once.

You don't save money forever.

I mean, you keep saving that money, but you don't get growth out of that.

You don't get productivity growth.

You get one-time adjustments to the level of productivity of your employees or your process.

So what we're looking for is a technology to give us consistently good changes in productivity so that all industries at scale get better, industries figure out new ways to generate revenue, new ways to do product design.

new ideas to come and shape the economy.

That's the thing that has a sustained productivity growth part.

So it's undeniable productivity growth has gone up.

What's not as clear is how long will that last.

Absolutely.

It is absolutely possible and something we have to interrogate.

I mean, right now, as you know too well, inflation is still above our target, our 2% target, and

price level's been high, much higher for a long time, and people are feeling stretched by the high inflation that they see.