It increased production, not productivity. That are two different measurements.

The problem with all those productivity gains by IT is that they are mainly in the administrative part of production. Yes, you can churn out more reports per time. But no one can eat reports, live in reports, cloth himself with reports or build reports into a car. Actual productivity gains are industrial, not administrative. How much has IT improved the construction of houses? How much has IT improved the planting of food crops? How much has IT improved the weaving of fabric? IT improves the planning, the selling, the overview. But it is already challenged to improve the actual transporting of stuff from A to B. The last improvements here were the introduction of the standard container, the movement from steam to diesel for rail, and the 40 tonne semi truck. Everything else like fleet management and satellite navigation made transporting from A to B more easy, but not more productive.

Excluding writing software, what AI products are bringing billions in revenue? Are there any billion+ revenue products outside of writing code?

That is a billion in revenue and not a billion in company or product valuation.

It's a billion in yearly revenue today and not an extrapolation of 500% monthly subscriber growth for the next 4 years.

Expect to see these multinationals to

- Incorporate a company to own the chemical or drug product in the Bahamas (you have to sue them there and not in the USA)
- Lease property, vehicles, etc. to said Bahamas company to extract the revenue and profits
- Wind down and let any companies heading for lawsuit problems go nearly bankrupt
- Have a replacement product ready to go with a newly minted Bahamas company

The net result,

- You can't sue the deep pocket company since the owner of the product is independent and in the Bahamas.
- Regulators can fine the company all they want, there are no assets to take and a 30 year pay from profits or revenue would result in the company just shutting down
- The deep pocket company gets the revenue and profits and none of the liability
- The contingency based US lawsuits won't happen as much as the lawyers know that there are no US based assets to get a hold of. Lawyers will not take the case on a contingency basis.

Longer term, large companies in general will split into many smaller companies to isolate risk, shift plants and property ownership to one company and the risks/liability to another company, ...

Venture capital will get in there and sell bonds backed by an income stream of 10% of the company revenue for 20 years to further offset risk and cash out up front.

It's highly likely that KPMG is using the test taker's entries to train an AI.

Here is the same business case given to 500 people, write answers to these X questions, write a business plan, give a staffing plan, budget, timeline, milestones, success criteria, etc.

Do this enough times and you have an AI which can pre-work inbound consulting jobs and need less or lower paid staff to do the work.

Why even quote someone touting their own product and downplaying possible negative effects?

At what point does Europe, the USA, Canada, NZ, Australia and Japan starting using coordinated trade policy to get large polluting countries by total tons of airborne pollution released and total plastic dumped in the ocean (India is amongst the largest) to reduce their pollution emissions?

It is a per country total emissions. It is not a per-capita or less stringent for "developing" economies measure.

A simpler measure would be to measure air quality in the 10 largest metropolitan areas weekly with Europe, US, Canada, Japan, Australia, and NZ making a small cut every year while India and other high polluting third-world countries making a large cut in airborne pollution every year.

It is that the corporate control cannot prevent a solo person working on their own from creating a song and making it available to the world's music listening audience.

They could control, shape and extract fees from millions of want to be star musicians every year, now the self publishing skips the gatekeeper corporations.

It doesn't mean that more artists will become wealthy. It means that a lot less music industry, music venue, music publishers, producers, etc. will have a lot less work and money to make.

Then there is the "music tickets" vs "eating for a week" economic question for a lot of people.

The major companies owning tens of thousands of songs are going to have to revalue their back-catalog soon.

The typical royalty stream for each song is already dropping sharper due steaming vs the older radio and media sales model.

AI music will quicken that royalty drop as a larger percentage of people will be content to listen to background "just OK enough" AI sludge music generated on the fly.

Since the back catalog and royalties are valued as a lifetime stream of future payments and net present value to today's money, a drop in expected future royalties will lower the company's total book (asset) value and lower the stock price.

A google or two will give an interesting read about how they identified archers in ancient mass battle grave sites by structural changes in their shoulder bones due to repeated specialized stress of drawing a bow.

Seems odd that the typical anti-building, anti-development (extract fees/taxes from companies) for increasing government revenue over the last 50 years is suddenly not important when the economy and national defense are declining.

Is it about the environment, preserving green spaces, preserving historic town centers; or is it about money?

And how will they compensate the thousands (millions?) of people and their higher cost of living forced by the regulations on preserving historical buildings?

I am not attacking the preservation effort, just the continual lowering of living standards via higher costs since 1970 via tax farming and regulation creep.

What would be the "Can we build?" answer if they went back 6 years and asked the same politicians and regulators if building a massive building complex there, requiring millions of gallons of water per year, raising the electricity prices for the region's poor population (most) and pensioners was ok?

Not from the UK disclaimer. Seen the same thing here, where the "We could never do that, it is life or death." from the government, both political parties, local governments, and regulators was somehow inconvient and ignored when a natural disaster happened and put the electric grid offline for a few days.

So, if large numbers of white collar jobs are going away and tens (hundreds?) of millions of white collar workers around the world will be out of work, Microsoft's own customers will stop licensing Windows, Office, Teams and lots of Microsoft back end services, right?

Not exactly. If you read again, you will notice that places with higher Muslim population tend to retain more pubs. It's the places where not many Muslims live, where the pubs are closing.

But apparently, the pub closing rate is higher in places with less Muslim population. So your logic is somewhat flawed.

Which in this case is the same: Smaller density of Muslim population correlates with higher pub closing rates.

The original MUD interface was telnet, if I remember correctly.