I wonder if this might point to some efficiency loss coming from AI. Let me explain.

Say in 2015 they installed those smart refrigerators, they could go from 20 people monitoring temperatures to 1. That was some profits being made by those companies, and they got to enjoy those benefits until now.

With AI finding exploits for so many things people wouldn’t spend time looking, we might need to go back to dumb fridges out of security concerns.

Now extrapolate to many other industries, the economic gain from AI might be hampered.

I think AI will fall squarely into the category of the rest of the post-PC era "tech advancement" in terms of the Productivity Paradox. Outside of very niche areas (like software engineering, making software that likely wouldn't actually improve productivity in a measurable (as in, shows up in productivity statistics) way any way), AI is likely to be more of the same. All the areas where there was real benefit to digitalization and all the low hanging fruit was already finished by the mainframe and minicomputer eras.

Maybe in a stroke of poetic symmetry all the programmers being replaced by AI will find work as cybersecurity professionals defending against AI.

It's more likely that we will see larger investments in cybersecurity.