John Plender’s The Long View “Have we reached a tipping point on public debt?” (December 20) notes the expectations of a potentially large boost to growth from the productivity gains arising from the adoption of artificial intelligence. This has encouraged the giant internet companies — Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle — to spend enormous sums on chip fabrication plants in anticipation of equally exceptional profits.

This prompts the reflection that, while it has certainly been true since the onset of the Industrial Revolution that gains in productivity have led with great reliability to stronger growth, this would not have happened without the essential transmission role of paid employment. It was the earnings from employment that provided the counterpart spending power and consumer demand that enabled integrated economic growth.

It is this nexus that successive developments — automation, IT, the internet, robotics — have dismantled, first in manufacturing, where robotics threatens the natural end of human employment, and now with AI in services. The consequence has been greatly reduced and increasingly narrow and specialised employment.

The wider result looks to be a steady increase in unemployment (and potential fall in consumer demand) and an equal fall, perhaps already discernible, in the rate of actual and potential economic growth.

Giles Conway-Gordon Ronan, MT, US