A tricky thing here is that it really depends how quickly a technology is adopted, improved, integrated, and so on.
For example, it seems like computers and the internet caused a bit of a surge in American productivity growth in the 90s. The surge wasn’t anything radical, though, for at least a few reasons:
Continued technological progress is necessary just to sustain steady productivity growth.
It’s apparently very hard, in general, to increase aggregate productivity.
The adoption, improvement, integration, etc., of information technology was a relatively gradual process.
If we instead suddenly jumped from a world where no company has information technology to one where every company is using 2020-level information technology (and using it with 2020-level tacit knowledge, IT-enabling capital investments, IT-adapted business practices, complementary technologies, etc.), then the productivity growth rate for that year would probably have been very high. But the gradualness of everything flattened out the surge. Given how slowly diffusion happens globally, I actually wouldn’t be surprised if the surge was totally invisible at the global level.
So if we want to predict that some technology (e.g. fusion power) will help surge the growth rate above some high threshold, we will also typically need to predict that its aggregrate impact will be unusually sudden.
A tricky thing here is that it really depends how quickly a technology is adopted, improved, integrated, and so on.
For example, it seems like computers and the internet caused a bit of a surge in American productivity growth in the 90s. The surge wasn’t anything radical, though, for at least a few reasons:
Continued technological progress is necessary just to sustain steady productivity growth.
It’s apparently very hard, in general, to increase aggregate productivity.
The adoption, improvement, integration, etc., of information technology was a relatively gradual process.
If we instead suddenly jumped from a world where no company has information technology to one where every company is using 2020-level information technology (and using it with 2020-level tacit knowledge, IT-enabling capital investments, IT-adapted business practices, complementary technologies, etc.), then the productivity growth rate for that year would probably have been very high. But the gradualness of everything flattened out the surge. Given how slowly diffusion happens globally, I actually wouldn’t be surprised if the surge was totally invisible at the global level.
So if we want to predict that some technology (e.g. fusion power) will help surge the growth rate above some high threshold, we will also typically need to predict that its aggregrate impact will be unusually sudden.