> There is no obvious point where the microcomputer or the Internet made any major difference

I think it lags. There was a sag between the mid-70s and mid-90s, which is when computers and the Internet were being rapidly developed but weren't really hitting the business mainstream. But late 90s through today it clearly ramped up a lot -- my bet is this is because of IT. It just takes a long time, it's not a sharp jump because not every business gets on board immediately and productively.

My guess is AI ends up the same. But then again, I'm not an economist, only a developer, so I just think I can tell anything about that productivity graph.

Are we looking at the same graph? What I see is that there was a huge spike at the onset of COVID, and then it flatlined and even corrected a bit, and in the end seems to have resumed the same trajectory it had before COVID.

If I understand correctly, the spike in 2020 was not any kind of jump in real productivity, either, it is an artifact of how the calculation is made -- there was a sudden drop in hours from low paid workers who typically have a lower than average contribution to productivity (as measured), so laying a bunch of them off skews the per-hour calculation. Then as things settled down companies re-hired, and then over-hired.

White collar work may have been phoning it in (literally and figuratively), but the drop is probably more likely due to "Labor Productivity (Output per Hour)" being measured using revenue from things like the social, entertainment, and travel industries taking a hit in customer spend (an empty restaurant has less output per hour than a busy restaurant, for example). It's not clear to me from that page/graph alone that an increase in stimulus spending is a cause, vs a correlation, for the drop.

The covid productivity spike is because all the low productivity retail workers got laid off. Then as they came back to work productivity went back down