Because invention is not the same thing as system change that is achieved through the diffusion of useful inventions across the economy.
A breakthrough can make something newly possible without making it immediately useful, affordable, trusted, integrated, or widely adopted. Economic change usually arrives only after businesses redesign workflows, reorganize complementary infrastructure, train people, change incentives, develop standards, policies and discover viable business models.
Think of the sequence:
Breakthrough → usable product → adoption → workflow change → complementary investment → measurable productivity → diffusion → aligned effective policies → system change.
The economy still must reorganize itself around the breakthrough.
This is why transformative technologies often produce a productivity J-curve: organizations initially spend money learning, integrating, restructuring, and fixing mistakes before the technology produces visible gains. The management of the risk of the visible gains that are identified must be cost effective.
AI illustrates this clearly. Model capabilities can improve rapidly while firms still struggle with reliability, privacy, integration, expertise, cost, and proving ROI. The promise of technology may be advancing faster than the institutions around it can adapt to adequately digest its capabilities.
Technical progress changes what is possible. Economic progress occurs when people, organizations, infrastructure, and institutions reorganize to make that possibility useful at scale.
What we should be asking is, what else needs to change before a given breakthrough or capability can become useful at scale in the economy.
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