The AI Productivity Paradox

Does AI really increase productivity? Photo: LinkedIn .

Amid rising concerns about job losses due to AI, optimists say it is simply a productivity tool that will benefit both workers and the economy . Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said that users will simply state their goals, while automated AI agents will plan, execute, and learn across all systems.

However, AI is creating a “productivity trap”, calling for more and more people to use it, even depend on it. This will lead to a decline in the ability to self-question, solve problems, and more seriously, affect creativity and breakthroughs in life.

Quantity over quality

The ideal AI tool , the FT argues, would be one where efficiency alone is enough to solve the productivity problem. The newspaper points out that over the past half-century, ever-faster computers have been built, but the rate of labor productivity growth in developed economies has fallen from around 2% per year in the 1990s to around 0.8% today.

When computers were supplemented by the Internet and global talent was connected, breakthroughs should have exploded. Instead, research productivity has declined. A scientist today produces fewer breakthroughs per dollar invested than their predecessor in the 1960s.

Economist Gary Becker has pointed out that parents face a choice between “quality and quantity.” The more children they have, for example, the less they can afford to invest in each child. The same thing may be happening with innovation.

Too many projects at once can affect creativity. Photo: Adobe Stock.

Large-scale studies of patent output confirm that the number of projects undertaken is inversely proportional to the likelihood of a breakthrough. In recent decades, scientific papers and patents have become more of a trickle-down affair than a breakthrough.

The great minds of history understood this. Isaac Newton once said that he would “keep a problem before him… until the first rays of light began to appear, little by little, and then burst forth into full and clear light.” “Innovation is saying no to a thousand things,” Steve Jobs agreed.

“AI's middle-class ability trap”

Mr. Ho Quoc Tuan, Director of the Master of Finance & Accounting Training Program at the University of Bristol, mentioned the concept of “AI’s average ability trap”. Regular work that requires the ability of people with average ability often includes many repetitive tasks, following clear and quantifiable processes. However, he believes that this is the outstanding strength of AI.

Large language models (LLMs) tend to stick to what statistics tell us is the general consensus. If you feed a chatbot 19th century text, it will “prove” that humans can’t fly, until the Wright brothers did.

A review published in Nature in March 2025 found that while LLMs can help reduce repetitive scientific work, the real leaps in thinking still come from humans. Tuan also believes that sticking to what is known, not daring to take risks, and having critical thinking are fatal weaknesses in the AI era.

Demis Hassabis, who leads the team at Google DeepMind that developed AlphaFold, a model that can predict protein shapes, and is considered one of the most significant scientific achievements in AI to date, admits that achieving true general artificial intelligence will still require “many more innovations.”

AlphaFold, the Nobel Prize-winning scientific work, also needs "more innovation". Photo: Google Deepmind.

In the near term, AI will be more about efficiency than creativity. A survey of more than 7,000 knowledge workers published on Arxiv found that those who used generative AI extensively spent an average of 3.6 hours less time per week on email (31 percent), while collaborative tasks remained largely unchanged.

However, if everyone outsources email answering to ChatGPT, the number of emails in inboxes could increase, losing the initial productivity. According to FT , the experience of the US productivity recovery in the 1990s shows that the benefits of new tools will quickly fade if not accompanied by real creative breakthroughs.

Source: https://znews.vn/nghich-ly-nang-suat-cua-ai-post1561451.html