It seems obvious to say that higher productivity is a good thing. As a government measure, labor productivity is roughly total gross domestic product divided by hours worked. And when it’s going up, it means wages can increase without causing inflation, which means better living standards and all kinds of improved outcomes for society.

That’s why a lot of experts are hopeful that artificial intelligence will usher in a productivity boom, like the ones that followed the advent of electricity or the steam engine. But there’s no guarantee that rising productivity from AI would be a tide that lifts all boats.

For instance, you could say that AI is bringing “productivity gains” to the voice over industry by letting companies do more with less, but that’s not really how voice actor George Washington III would put it.

“There's just less work. That took jobs away,” he said.

Convincing synthetic voices are increasingly popping up on customer service hotlines, corporate trainings and audiobooks.

Washington, who also runs an advocacy organization for voice artists, said he still makes a comfortable living doing video games and commercials, but he worries the opportunities will continue to shrink.

“Because people will say they don't want to pay for what we do,” he said. “If you get paid 30 cents a word, you are a lot more expensive than if they just plug it in — use AI voices.”

Washington has seen the hollowing out of an industry before — he grew up in a factory town in Illinois, “that literally had the sign, ‘Will the last person leaving Kankakee please turn off the lights,’ right as industry moved out and Kankakee converted to a service economy. I watched it, I saw it happen.”

He fears the move to AI could also leave people behind.

“There’ve been lots of episodes of productivity increase, in fact, we could probably say most instances in world history when productivity has gone up and only a few people have benefited, so it didn’t filter down,” said Simon Johnson, a Nobel prize-winning economist at MIT, who co-authored the book “Power and Progress” about the often lopsided gains brought by new technologies.

Take the industrial revolution — the biggest leap in sustained productivity the world had ever seen. It started in the late eighteenth century in the north of England with advances in textile production.

“There were fortunes to be made in the cotton industry,” said Johnson, “but something was preventing the higher productivity from filtering down to higher wages.”

He argues early inventions replaced the work of skilled artisans with repetitive, lower-paying jobs. For more than half a century, real wages stagnated or even fell.

“And so if I say to you, ‘Congratulations, AI revolution is here — you will get higher wages in 60 years,’” he said, “I think you should say, ‘Well, hold on there, what if we get it sooner? What would that take?’”

Johnson said innovations are more likely to spread prosperity when they create new, specialized tasks for humans or when they assist workers but don’t replace them.

It’s not clear that is the path we’re on, says Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia.

“With the roll out of the current generative AI systems I’m concerned that they will actually lead to an increase in inequality,” he said, noting agentic AI can now perform some complex tasks without human supervision.

Plus, in an uncertain economy companies might be eager to cut costs, or signal to investors that they are, by replacing workers with AI — whether it’s more effective or not.

“If the same amount of output can be produced by a lot fewer workers, it shows up positively in productivity statistics, but it would show up as basically a lack of growth,” Korinek said.

To voice actor George Washington III, it sometimes feels like he’s watching a replay of what happened in his hometown when factories shut down.

“To see people know that there is an end coming to the thing that they do and not know what the next step is going to be, it's a terrifying thing,” he said.

At 57, Washington doesn’t really have a backup plan. He’s betting there will always be a value to the human voice, and he’s using his own to speak up for a kind of progress that brings everyone along.