The American economy accelerated nicely in the middle of last year. A Two Percent Economy no more! Well, at least for a bit. Economic growth now seems to be reverting to the humdrum pace seen over most of the post-Financial Crisis recovery. (The Trump White House, it should be noted, sees things more optimistically.) The combo of slower labor force growth and productivity growth means the economy’s growth potential isn’t what it once was.

But maybe artificial intelligence can accelerate economic growth on a sustained basis by boosting productivity growth. In their 2018 paper, “AI and the Economy,” economists Jason Furman and Robert Seamans point out that many experts think “AI and other forms of advanced automation, including robots and sensors, can be thought of as a general purpose technology that enable lots of follow-on innovation that ultimately leads to productivity growth.”

How much more productivity growth? There are plenty of guesstimates. Maybe AI’s impact will be like that of robots, which one study found may have added 0.4 percentage points of annual GDP growth between 1993 and 2007 on average for 17 advanced economies. Or maybe AI will be far more consequential. A 2016 analysis by Accenture found AI could greatly benefit the US economy “increasing its annual growth rate from 2.6 percent to 4.6 percent by 2035, translating to an additional USD $8.3 trillion in gross value-added. Or maybe it will be somewhere in between. A 2014 paper by economists John Fernald of the San Francisco Federal Reserve and Charles Jones of Stanford’s business school noted that AI introduces “a fundamental uncertainty into the future of growth.”