The big bet on AI—the near-trillion dollars that hyperscalers are spending to build out the technology’s infrastructure—is predicated on the belief that productivity will skyrocket.
If that bet pays off, a new report from policy research center Yale Budget Lab finds AI could help tackle one of the country’s most urgent crises: the $39 trillion national debt. The report offers a scenario on how AI could trim down the country’s piling debt, but comes with a significant caveat: to have AI productivity completely reverse the upward trajectory of the national debt, the government would have to forgo supporting the workers the technology displaces.
