Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. AI could be the ultimate productivity hack. From American public media,

this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Carrino.

The internet is full of tips for using artificial intelligence tools like chat GPT to take your

productivity to the next level. But today we're talking about productivity as an economic indicator,

which is a little different. I feel productive if I do some interviews, a little laundry,

and make overnight oats. But in the macro sense, productivity measures economic output

against the resources that go into it, sort of GDP divided by hours worked.

Often, new technology drives leaps in productivity, like the industrial revolution.

But the last 20 years of digital innovations haven't really moved the needle much,

so could new AI tools kickstart a productivity boom? Anton Koroneck at the University of Virginia

recently wrote about this for the Brookings Institution. He told me why economists like

himself pay such close attention to this metric. Ultimately, the main source of our wealth and

our welfare is the level of productivity. So we still work roughly the same amount of time

that we worked 200 years ago. We are using a little bit more capital, and that makes us able to

produce more in the economy. But the main reason why we are something like 20 times wealthier now

than we were 200 years ago is because productivity has grown so much. So the story of economic

development is essentially a story of increasing productivity. And how much might new

generative AI tools increase productivity? Imagine every cognitive worker in the economy,

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