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Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

nytimes.com

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Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#41

Post by thewarrior »

uejfiweun wrote: post #2

I 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…

Because software cannot produce resources just because it exists. Productivity refers to being able to actually manufacture more widgets and things like food, roads. Yes technology has made things cheaper. By moving things across the globe and creating a complex supply chain that can produce more goods for less energy and raw material input.

But the per Capita availability of energy and minerals is a fundamental bottleneck that things like CRM software can only go so far in helping.

The article talks about software that allows a call center employee to handle more customers better. This is great but how does something like this help society produce more heating and food which are currently in short supply ? It makes the company more profit and saves customers some money. But if they try to actually get more food it will cause inflation.

I would highly encourage people to read the work of Vaclav Smil. In the grand scheme of things iPhones are irrelevant.

Half the world depends on natural gas and ammonia fertilizer so they don't starve to death. We are living through the consequences of this as we speak.

Software simply isn't on the scale of things like coal, oil, natural gas, electricity or even washing machines.

Computers might be more like the printing press. Perhaps centuries from now we can look back and say what innovations came about due to multi century second order and third order effects.

We in the industry have become lost in the world of bits and "productivity" in producing TikToks and targetting ads for mobile games doesn't help as much as we think towards supply. These are fundamentally ways of aggregating and coordinating demand.

The problem is now on the supply side. We need software that runs on robots eliminating workers and working 24x7 doing things like mining, agriculture and warehouses. We also need eliminate middle men and deliver directly to the consumer.

Beyond that we need fundamentally new energy sources. Software can help here but increasing digitization mainly creates fat middlemen who don't add as much productivity into the world as they take.

Hence I think Chinas new approach to tech regulatuion that curtails middleman platforms and encourages startups on the supply side makes a lot of sense.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#42

Post by ebiester »

gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word.

I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#45

Post by dahart »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #35
uejfiweun wrote: post #2

I 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…

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300…

> So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year.

Loaded use of the world “stole” there.

This is a faulty analysis. It’s well studied and well known, for example, that the top 10% of people income wise have ~70% of the wealth in the US. Similar patterns exist globally. This has been reproduced many ways by many people and squarely contradicts your calculation.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#46

Post by jayd16 »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #35
uejfiweun wrote: post #2

I 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…

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300…

I would argue it's still a worthy goal if only to redistribute the influence that wealth brings.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#47

Post by Theitheave42 »

ebiester wrote: post #42
gumby wrote: post #5

I 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…

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word. I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

For sure! I’m definitely hoping to see more workers and employees used to short conference calls while growing up on Skype and Discord. So perhaps as the new generations come into the workforce we’ll see it much more. Definitely seems like I’m much more efficient with my peers while discussing stuff over voice than text.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#48

Post by pdimitar »

Replying only to the title:

Because nobody wants to be "the idiot who pays for innovation from which all our competitors will also benefit". It's like the arms race that the countries all over the world do; you might swear to everything that's holy you're peaceful but you don't know if your neighbor is an a-hole so you arm yourself just in case.

The amount of handy scripts and clever engineering solutions I've come up with in personal and freelance projects beats any salaried work creativity by 10x, if not 50x even. Regularly.

But after 20 years in the profession I learned not to offer these solutions in my regular work. The other programmers will mercilessly rip apart any of your ideas and will ask for literally every other way for you to do it and not the one you suggested. Nevermind that it's none of their damned business how I deliver the end result (I mean if it does NOT involve code to maintain in the future -- obviously).

It's weird. Guess we have some very common and stereotypical weaknesses?

But whatever the case, I gradually learned to keep my mouth shut and get the job done by any means necessary.

It's better to ask for an apology than for permission, I have found empirically.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#49

Post by nebula8804 »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #35
uejfiweun wrote: post #2

I 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…

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300…

>The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY.

Don't leave us hanging throw8383833jj, where did the wealth go?

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#50

Post by lordgrenville »

deanCommie wrote: post #19

There is an infamous anecdote from the turn/mid of the 20th century: People believed that innovations in vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc would cause people to have more leisure time because of how much time it saved in cleaning. But it didn't happen. Why? Because people's expectations for hygiene and cleanliness went up. And as it became easier to clean houses and clothes, people were more comfortable with hav…

Exactly. We have a lot more free time, we've just raised our leisure standards (dining out more frequently, traveling more) and come up with more forms of entertainment (social media, streaming platforms, gaming). That this sounds to most of us like a wasted opportunity might be because these things are not very fulfilling, or it might just be the hedonic treadmill.
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