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A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

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Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#51

Post by sixtypoundhound »

lucidguppy wrote: post #25
hliyan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really not the author's point. I think this quote illustrates his point better: "Online shopping came along in the 1990s but retailers struggled to adapt business processes to the internet. They needed to build complementary infrastructure such as fulfillment centers, and, the authors note, customers had to adapt their habits, as well." The lag between commercialization and widespread adoption is wider than we…

If Sears and Service Merchandise had simply held out for a couple of years and put up a web store front - the Dow would look a little different today. Customers had adapted in the late 80's to something like Amazon (only problem was waiting for a few minutes after checkout) - but then they adapted to big box stores (made possible by big banks and supply chain software) - which ended up being a huge diversion of resou…

Hmm... that presumes sears (the organization) can change fast enough to identify and embrace the right business model. There's more than a website to running a successful e-commerce business.

Internal culture at Google / Amazon, especially during the growth phase, was likely very different than your typical Fortune 500.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#53

Post by YaxelPerez »

inciampati wrote: post #8

I have frequently wondered if the lag in productivity is partly due to the distracting power of the internet and social media. This isn't really paralleled by the other technical advances that the authors of the study this piece summarizes were examining. Also, AI? We don't have anything even approaching AI in play now nor on the immediate horizon. The energy costs it would have are still enormous, even if we really…

Your brain could be considered a general intelligence, and it only uses a couple of watts. Energy consumption isn't the issue. However, I agree. AI is a bit overhyped right now, and AGI is still pretty far away imo.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#54

Post by yorwba »

mjburgess wrote: post #38
icebraining wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the electric engine can produce the same things ten times faster, you've just removed nine-tenths of the users. Sure, someone is still around, but then again, automatic factories still have some people supervising them - just much fewer.

Increasing worker productivity has always lead to fulfilling larger a demand. What is missing from all these discussions is that human wanting is essential infinite. The more productive you can be at making something, the more it will be taken for granted and a new thing wanted. Demand is infinite. Work is created to supply it. There is no amount of labour that will ever exhaust it. All automation does is increase th…

Demand is ultimately limited by human attention. There is only so much time someone can spend buying goods and services, especially if they intend to actually do something with them. And the demand for each individual product is far below that. There are some products virtually everyone will buy, but usually only once in a certain timeframe. Then there are specialized things like combines or milling machines where demand only goes up if some other industry expands.

If you improve your factory equipment to produce double the items per employee-hour at a lower unit cost, you likely won't see the demand double in proportion. Most likely you'll just eat into the market share of a competitor. Maybe some new customers will newly be able to afford the product, but once it has "taken for granted" status, even that is impossible.

And we are not increasing the number of these "taken for granted products" very quickly. As far as physical products are concerned, I can only think of the smart phone as a recent example; actually that decreased the number of those products, by obsoleting cameras and dumb phones for most people. Among internet services, advertising is the dominant money-maker, and that's a zero-sum game for eyeballs which only employs a relatively small number of people.

As more and more products and services are provided by machines, fewer and fewer people become necessary to keep things running in the background. Sure, some of the replaced people can try to come up with new things to offer, but most of them won't succeed, and the vast majority will eventually be unable to cost-effectively provide value to other humans at all.

At that point, we'll find out whether it's cheaper to feed them or shoot them.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#55

Post by taneq »

Wildgoose wrote: post #9

"A third of the rise in the S&P 500 stock market index this year is attributable to Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp." And yet don't those companies directly employ only around 150,000 workers in total? Yes, Apple off-shores employment to Foxconn but they are open about their plans to automate their factories and replace all the workers. This isn't a matter of…

In before all the posts lamenting "AAAFM" and its various impacts on the tech community without explaining that it refers to Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#56

Post by ameister14 »

CydeWeys wrote: post #48
ameister14 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first glance, Amazon alone employs more than half a million people. Microsoft is over 100k, Apple is about 80k in the US, google's about 60k, and Facebook is around 17k.

I think that figure for Alphabet is off by at least a factor of two. Are we including staff worldwide, or just US-based staff? Full-time employees only, or also all contracted workers?

It was off by about 15k, apparently.

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/24/16022210/alphabet-google-em...

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#58

Post by [deleted] »

sixtypoundhound wrote: post #51
lucidguppy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Sears and Service Merchandise had simply held out for a couple of years and put up a web store front - the Dow would look a little different today. Customers had adapted in the late 80's to something like Amazon (only problem was waiting for a few minutes after checkout) - but then they adapted to big box stores (made possible by big banks and supply chain software) - which ended up being a huge diversion of resou…

Hmm... that presumes sears (the organization) can change fast enough to identify and embrace the right business model. There's more than a website to running a successful e-commerce business. Internal culture at Google / Amazon, especially during the growth phase, was likely very different than your typical Fortune 500.

[deleted]

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#59

Post by CydeWeys »

ameister14 wrote: post #56
CydeWeys wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that figure for Alphabet is off by at least a factor of two. Are we including staff worldwide, or just US-based staff? Full-time employees only, or also all contracted workers?

It was off by about 15k, apparently. https://www.recode.net/2017/7/24/16022210/alphabet-google-em...

That's only the headcount for full-time employees. You've got to at least double it to account for all the contractors as well.

Re: A Tech-Driven Boom Is Coming; Please Be Patient

#60

Post by Chathamization »

marcosdumay wrote: post #49
heisenbergs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lag is probably the wrong word. It's a misconception that adoption should be instant. It took a good 50 years for the electric motor to supplant the steam engine, despite it being superior in virtually every way. Tech adoption takes time, given that many things need to be re-learnt/engineered. It's why i'm positive that there won't be swathes of unemployeed people due to tech. It will happen gradually, as it has alwa…

As long as there are more productive employment types available. Anyway, I disagree. I think the sheer speed of the change will create a disaster much sooner than automation quality will make humans obsolete. It took more than a century for the steam engine to replace animal engines around the world, then the electric engine replaced it in half a century. Things are accelerating, and are already much faster than by t…

Productivity growth has actually been relatively low recently[1]. There doesn't seem to be a trend towards acceleration.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm

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