Digitalization and labor productivity: paradoxes of development

The changes introduced to our world by digital technologies are currently growing, becoming not only permanent, but also continuous. Almost all companies are now actively adopting digital technologies to produce and deliver goods and services in innovative ways that better meet customer needs than ever before. In many cases, they disrupt the structure of industries by capturing leadership from companies that have dominated the market for generations. Current competitors in many sectors will either cope with this digital challenge or they will fail. The benefits of the digital revolution for customers are clear. The way we shop, send payments and borrow money, communicate with each other and spend our leisure time has changed dramatically. In the workplace, an increasing number of simple and complex tasks - from moving boxes to medical procedures - are now performed in part or in whole by intelligent machines. In this regard, many questions arise at once: how will this affect the main economic indicators, how will it affect productivity. In this article, we review the evidence and comment on the modern performance paradox and propose a solution. Namely, there is no inherent mismatch between forward-looking technological optimism and backward disappointment. Both can exist simultaneously. Indeed, there is a strong conceptual basis for this expectation when the economy is undergoing such a restructuring that is associated with transformational technologies.