It is increasingly acknowledged that we are on the verge of the next technological revolution and the fourth industrial revolution, driven by the digitization and interconnection of all physical elements and infrastructure under the control of advanced intelligent systems. Therefore, there will be a new era of automation that should result in enhanced productivity. However, such productivity enhancements have been anticipated before, particularly during the third industrial revolution commonly known as the ‘information age’, and have failed to materialize. Were the productivity increases observed following the first and second industrial revolutions a one-time aberration that will not be repeated in the new digital age? In this paper, we attempt to address this question by a semi-quantitative analysis of the prior productivity jumps and their physical technological origins, and extend this analysis to the latent set of analogous digital technologies. Using this approach, we project that there will indeed be a second productivity jump in the United States that will occur in the 2028–2033 timeframe when the aggregate of the constituent technologies reaches the tipping point at 51 percent penetration.

中文翻译：

---

新数字时代的生产力增长会回归吗？第四次工业革命对生产力的潜在影响分析

人们越来越认识到，在先进智能系统控制下的所有物理元素和基础设施的数字化和互连驱动下，我们正处于下一次技术革命和第四次工业革命的边缘。因此，将会有一个自动化的新时代，它将提高生产力。然而，这种生产力的提高以前曾被预料到，特别是在通常被称为“信息时代”的第三次工业革命期间，但未能实现。第一次和第二次工业革命后观察到的生产力增长是一次性的，不会在新的数字时代重演吗？在本文中，我们试图通过对先前生产力飞跃及其物理技术起源的半定量分析来解决这个问题，并将这种分析扩展到潜在的一组类似的数字技术。使用这种方法，我们预计美国确实会在 2028 年至 2033 年间发生第二次生产力跃升，届时构成技术的总和达到 51% 的渗透率临界点。