The Digital Tech Utopia We Didn't Build--and Maybe Couldn't (Part 1)

We had big dreams for the internet, but were our loftiest ambitions ever feasible?

In late June, Goldman Sachs produced a provocatively titled report, “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”, which pulled no punches around how the current investment path in AI capital expenditures (“capex”) isn’t likely to pay off. In it, Daron Acemoglu, author of Why Nations Fail and Power and Progress, only forecast a 0.5% contribution to prod…