Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by throw8383833jj » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

kylecordes wrote: post #101

throw8383833jj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest drop in wealth is Shelter and Medical. 50 years ago land was much cheaper. A 300K house (non-land cost) costs 310K (maybe 10k for the land). Whereas today, in states where much job creation happens (i won't name names), a 300K house costs 600K or more. You could say, the previous land owner made all that money and it's true. But, it's just a one time wealth transfer from the latest generation to previous…

The challenge with shelter is that it is fundamentally a positional good. Everyone wants to be within the x% most convenient, which is say, desirable, places to live. So as there are more and more people with more money to chase those limited "slots", they get more expensive. Making everyone worse off. The solution is to massively build many more new good places to live; but there are also enormous forces against tha…

Absolutely >>> The solution is to massively build many more new good places to live

People underestimate the positive impact of this solution.

It's not like we don't have the space. All that's lacking is the will.

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

#122

Post by Barrin92 » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:08 PM UTC

Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s?

Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one case you're going to see skyscrapers, commercial airplanes, nuclear power plants, electricity everywhere, cars going at amazing speeds. In the latter case what's the difference, people paying with their phones and different fashion mostly.

'Innovation' in the internet age, say the last 30 years has mostly been limited to enable hedonistic digital consumption with very little impact on how we fundamentally move through the world. The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet. A 100 years ago to 50 years ago meant going from horse carriages to trains and from weeks on a ship to hours on a plane. Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.

That's why productivity growth is low, the world hasn't changed that much. There's still marginal improvements obviously which do add up over time but the 'unprecedent pace of innovation' you hear about from tech evangelists is nowhere.

Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet, a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other? I think it really puts into perspective how much or rather little value those 'innovations' add.

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

#123

Post by angarg12 » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:09 PM UTC

One thing I don't see mentioned often is that productivity in software development has skyrocketed, but it's hard to appreciate. Today's services are much more sophisticated and complex than just a decade ago. Even if some of that complexity is incidental and undesirable, it's undeniable that today a small team can pump out a much more refined app that entire companies did back then.

This isn't only guess work, here is a real example: when I joined my first shop we had 2 sysadmin working full time to maintain a couple dozen servers. Over time they started introducing virtualization, automation, devops... by the end of my 7 year tenure, we had 250+ servers and only one sysadmin part time working on them. That's between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude improvement, and my company wasn't special by any means.

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

#124

Post by I_dev_outdoors » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #37

mikkergp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The only real advance in call center tech in the last twenty years (imo) has been the “press 1 to be called back in the order your call was received”.

My dentist has a PBX setup so that when you call and you don't get anyone or leave a voicemail, you get a link in a SMS with a link to schedule a call back.

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

#125

Post by throw8383833jj » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:13 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #103

throw8383833jj wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back. You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution. The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is no…

Let’s frame it differently. If you redistributed all wealth from just the top 1% today to all us citizens, each person would get 40T / 300M = $133K, which would make a real (and massive) difference in most people’s lives. Redistribute the top 10%, and everyone gets $320k in savings. This would be an average of 30x more savings for the bottom half than they’d have otherwise. The biggest problem with your calculation i…

Ok, if you disagree with the number 30 as the number of years needed to acquire that wealth, just use yearly income figures.

Assuming 60K is the average. So, top 10% at 173K means 113K more than the median houshold. 113/10 = 11.3K extra. So, redistributing top 10% would mean 11.3K extra for 60K average. It's something but not life changing. Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto winner loses almost everything within a few years, I'd say an additional 11K wouldn't help people a huge amount.

And, you have to remember, this is an excerise for learning how much wealth is distributed per capita in the top. if you actually instituted anything close to these policies, total, average wages would decrease dramatically as the reduced incentive to earn more prevents people from earning more.

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

#126

Post by jseliger » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

I've observed similar issues: https://seliger.com/2015/08/02/how-computers-have-made-grant...

Lowering the friction of process often results in more process, but not more result.

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

#127

Post by npc12345 » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

ipnon wrote: post #99

The right side of the bell curve can now program an application worth many dollars per month and zero marginal reproduction costs. The left side of the bell curve is incapable of extending these technologies but increasingly consumes them due to their low cost. This can explain the seemingly paradoxical phenomena of the rich becoming fabulously richer, wage growth stagnating on average, and productivity barely improv…

There's also people with no high school diplomas making 6 figures from advertising on those very same social networks.

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

#128

Post by vkou » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

npc12345 wrote: post #127

ipnon wrote: post #99

The right side of the bell curve can now program an application worth many dollars per month and zero marginal reproduction costs. The left side of the bell curve is incapable of extending these technologies but increasingly consumes them due to their low cost. This can explain the seemingly paradoxical phenomena of the rich becoming fabulously richer, wage growth stagnating on average, and productivity barely improv…

There's also people with no high school diplomas making 6 figures from advertising on those very same social networks.

A good hustler can make six figures in a sales job without any diploma.

Sales doesn't care about your credentials, all your boss wants to know is if you can close deals.

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

#129

Post by marginalia_nu » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #122

Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s? Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one…

There's a weird disconnect with computers.

The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Your average web based word processor with cloud storage performs about the same as Microsoft Word did on Windows 3.1 on a 486 saving onto a floppy. Screens are bigger, resolutions are bigger, but the content is largely the same because the limit is human perception not technology.

If you actually keep things simple, you can build absolutely ridiculous things off modern hardware. I'm running an Internet search engine out of my living room. You could not that 20 years ago. What makes it possible is modern SSDs and the absolutely mind-boggling computing power of modern CPU.

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

#130

Post by bmitc » Tue, May 24, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

Most of today's technology keeps us busy but does not make us more productive.

Productivity via the hand of technology requires a true commitment to develop technology that augments human activity rather than replace it. Since that is most certainly not what we do with modern technology, we end up with systems that poorly replace humans and provide terrible interfaces between humans and those systems. Thus, it keeps us busy but not productive.

With regard to consumer technology, it is explicitly designed to keep consumers more busy than productive. A productive consumer gets in the pool and gets out. A busy consumer gets in the pool and stays there until the skin wrinkles and still lingers.