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Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
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Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#22I mean, technology making us more productive seems obviously true on it's face, so what gives?
--> Productivity, which is defined as the value of goods and services produced per hour of work.
Seems like an interesting measure. So as companies become more efficient and the cost of goods goes down, so does productivity. So you might be able to argue we were more probably productive per unit of work building mainframes than we are building iphones.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#23Because nobody wants to make themselves or their friends obsolete. In fact, technical debt is a feature, not a bug. Invent a highly functional, durable tool: nobody will buy anything related to it from you again.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#241. Technology is making us more productive! Way, way more productive. More or less all of the gains are captured by tech companies who make the technology.
2. Technology is not necessarily adopted for productivity. It is often adopted to facilitate legibility into the day to day activity of the organization. This is often at the expense of productivity! Moreover, this is often acceptable to management!
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#25Why Isn't _every_ new tech making us productive. Some definitely are, diff tracking like github, any comms software, accounting software etc do make us a lot more productive.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#26I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly lin…
> Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? A Rolodex used to be enough. Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something.
> Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something.
A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#27Have a look at our GDP per capita graph and tell me again we're not more productive. We're working less and less and making more and more. Some of it is commercial and social innovation, but a lot is technology as well.
I work as a specific type of tech consultant to medium-sized companies, and it's wondrous to behold how easy we can make many aspects of business. Critical functions that took multiple handshakes, paper mail, multiple mistakes, and at least a week now take pre-arranged agreements, API's, and they happen in maybe two seconds, almost always perfectly, and before anybody even realizes.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#28I was rather disappointed in Lohr (author of this piece) as he is smart and was around in the 1990s for Solow’s famous quip “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”. In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a flop (especially in the US’s then-backwards wireless environment). It takes time for people to understand a new capability and for it to reach the point whe…
The call center seems to be like the standard MBA case of a cost center to optimize but where efficiency is only half correlated with positive customer experience. I mean if you can route people to the right place, and get peoples questions answered quickly it's great, but that leaves a long tail of people in the nightmare situation of digging through phone trees, dealing with untrained staff, or having someone try to cut a call short rather than give you the best experience.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#29I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly lin…
I think the non-super rich see a lot of advantages from the modern economy. As an example, just yesterday, I was picking up an order at Walmart. The guy who brought the bags to my car had Airpods in. The existence of Airpods (and phones, Internet, Bluetooth, streaming services, etc) may not have made this guy more productive, but it probably improves his life somewhat.
Am I missing something, or is this like the first time you see a guy with AirPods? What’s the significance?
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#30Have a look at our GDP per capita graph and tell me again we're not more productive. We're working less and less and making more and more. Some of it is commercial and social innovation, but a lot is technology as well. I work as a specific type of tech consultant to medium-sized companies, and it's wondrous to behold how easy we can make many aspects of business. Critical functions that took multiple handshakes, pap…
Writing or titling an article with an obviously false premise is an easy way to invoke emotions and get clicks.
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