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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?

#111

Post by koliber »

Productivity has grown! But not for everyone, sadly.

Some people are now magnitudes more productive than they were before. But that requires an understanding of technology, and a drive for improving tools, process, and themselves. The people who can do this effectively are reaping the productivity benefits.

Sadly, not everyone is. Some people don't want to do it. Many don't have access to the the instruction that would allow them to unlock these productivity gains. Many productivity tools continue to suffer from usability issues, which limit who can harness them.

I'm an optimist. The past has show that eventually, most people can benefit from productivity gains. It takes time for tools to become easy enough for the majority to benefit from them. It's happening all around us.

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

#112

Post by iskander »

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…

Medical record digitization seems to have had a neutral-to-negative impact on hospital efficiency. It's hard to believe since the alternative sounds mind-numbingly inefficient but there are tons of low-tech streamlined processes (like having a whiteboard in each patient's room) which are being undermined by having a constellation of disconnected staff all dumping information into Epic and not having time to read other entries.

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

#113

Post by makeitdouble »

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.

> refused to get on the phone

So your solution to this attitude is to insist more on meetings and phone calls ?

Did anyone ask that person why they came to hate getting on the phone that much ?

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

#114

Post by prometheus76 »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #26
jstarfish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They would get another rolodex.

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

#115

Post by kylecordes »

sharemywin wrote: post #7
jstarfish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Act 2.0 was the desktop version of CRM. and alot of old systems had built in customer databases. had contact info in them. and zoom is cool but phones work in a lot of cases.

If your team was sitting at desks on a fast network, Act! probably obtained 80% of the productivity benefit of the best available, most expensive CRM available today. Or maybe even better than that; because (again assuming a fast network locally) it could be operated with keystrokes quite a lot faster than many of today’s CRM system.

I worked in a place where we had phone, email, and FAX (!) integration set up also. A rep could be on a phone they didn't dial, configuring a quote for what their contact asked for, click a button and it emailed or faxed to the contact. Over 20 years ago.

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

#116

Post by kkfx »

...Because new technology is not build for us but against us for a little group of IT giants interests... Simply.

Classic desktops are for productivity BUT they do not generate enough lock-in nor give their main devs such a tight grip as actual systems and so on.

Unfortunately to understand people need to know both models, witch is highly unlikely outside IT techies community and even unlikely inside it...

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

#117

Post by humbleMouse »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#118

Post by DANK_YACHT »

marcosdumay wrote: post #109
FredPret wrote: post #27

Have 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…

Well, for the lazy, there's a nice summary here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... I've pre-selected a few lines because the problem is supposed to exist on the data of rich countries. You can deselect them at the blue bar at the top of the page (it's not obvious). I couldn't cut the data in any way that showed the issue ever existed. There is an half decade long decrease on the wealth o…

The graph looks linear. If productivity gains were increasing (or even staying constant), you'd expect it to be more than linear. This implies the rate of productivity change is decreasing.

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

#120

Post by dahart »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #72
confidantlake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money. That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000 dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to me.

30 is my estimation as to the number of years it takes for the average billionaire to achieve their wealth. most billionaires are pretty old, so I'd say 30 is conservative. so, 2K per family/year in a country where the median houshold income is 60K, that's about 3.3% of their income.

It’s irrelevant how long it took to accumulate. If you’re hypothetically redistributing wealth, then the hypothetical side assumption should be that it took the same amount of time to accumulate the “redistributed” wealth. You should be comparing saved wealth in the real world to saved wealth in the hypothetical world, not using a strange misleading wealth per year metric.
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