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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?

#131

Post by marginalia_nu »

angarg12 wrote: post #123

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…

You could also less charitably read that "growth" as using 250 servers to do the same job you previously did with two. I guess that's growth for sever manufacturers, but I'd expect with more powerful hardware we'd need fewer servers, rather than more.

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

#132

Post by IshKebab »

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…

> could you tell that you're not in the 80s?

Well yes, because we have solar panels and heat pumps and battery powered power tools and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and microwave ovens and smart lights and ...

You wouldn't expect walls and carpets to change.

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

#133

Post by SoftTalker »

angarg12 wrote: post #123

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…

Yes, but a person can write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word. How many millions of dev-hours have been expended on stuff that fundamentally doesn't do anything new?

Edit: saying they don't do anything new isn't right. They do, especially with regards to collaboration. What I really mean is that they don't make the essential task -- the actual writing -- much easier. That's still human/mental work. Once you have come up with the words, putting the words into a document is the easy part.

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

#134

Post by humanistbot »

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…

> 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?

> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.

Energy efficiency and fuel economy have made massive gains. Materials are stronger and lighter. Batteries last ages compared to 30 years ago.

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

#135

Post by kareemsabri »

angarg12 wrote: post #123

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…

I'm genuinely curious about this, and would like to see some data. When I started coding professionally the LAMP stack was the go-to, and your program would generally just do all the "work" in the context of a web request and then render an HTML page in response.

Now, the systems are much more complex for sure (queues and asynchronous processing, event buses, microservices, multiple databases for different purposes) but I'm not sure that (functionality provided to business) / (number of developers) has increased all that much.

Of course I could be dealing with a bias because as a novice programmer I worked on simpler programs and now I work on more complex / powerful programs.

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

#136

Post by honkler »

wincy wrote: post #92
titzer wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be a lot more effective to redistribute that wealth, first, not over 30 years, and second, not to 100% of the population, but to the bottom income brackets, so the smallest quintile or even decile. So a one-time payout to the bottom 10% would be $150,000. For 20% or 30% of the population, that kind of money could absolutely and instantly lift them out of poverty. Moreover, you needn't take every last cent from t…

Seems immoral to give it to the bottom 10% of people in the US, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Why not give $15,000 each to the 300 million poorest people in the world, or $5000 to the 1 billion poorest?

there are oligarchs in every country, just like the united states. Could drain the swamp and give people back their money.

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

#137

Post by adhesive_wombat »

humanistbot wrote: post #134
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…

> 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? > The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet. Energy efficiency and fuel economy have made massive gains. Materials are stronger and lighter. Batteries last ages compared to 30 years ago.

Also they go wrong a hell of a lot less often. 80s cars were mostly complete shit and no one was sorry to see them go.

Also if you crash one, you're vastly less likely to die.

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

#138

Post by ausbah »

koliber wrote: post #111

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 wou…

is this something limited to software engineering ? other specific fields? practices like communication?

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

#139

Post by kareemsabri »

IshKebab wrote: post #132
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…

> could you tell that you're not in the 80s? Well yes, because we have solar panels and heat pumps and battery powered power tools and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and microwave ovens and smart lights and ... You wouldn't expect walls and carpets to change.

> vacuum cleaners

mainstream since at least the 1950s

> dishwashers

1970s

> microwave ovens

available but fairly expensive in the 80s, ubiquitous in the 90s

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

#140

Post by greggman3 »

what is the definition of productive? In 1985 I had a one month $1200 phone bill (well, the bill was to my dad) from calling my girlfriend on the other side of the country. I wrote letters to her on paper and sent them via snail mail.

Today I video chat and play network games with my friend's 7yr old son 8000 kilometers away.

In that same time I had an Atari 1200XL and it took several minutes to run the assembler to cross compile the C64 game I was working on. Today I can do far more impressive things from any browser just using jsfiddle/codepen and things run instantly.

Today I can make music in Garageband, Ableton, and all the alternatives in minutes. In the mid 80s my dad had to use a 4 track reel-to-reel with overdub and he had to be able to actually play all the instruments.

Today I can grab blender/resolve/fusion and compete with almost any TV show on quality and broadcast my stuff for free on youtube. Vs in the 80s/90s when that would have taking a huge team of people and $$$$$$$$ in equipment plus access to either retail and VHS copies or access to broadcast gate keepers.

Unreal/Unity have vastly increased productivity in games. Just go to any gamejam and look at how far people used to their tools can get in 2 days vs what they could make in the same amount of time in the mid-80s. Or look at the explosion of games on places like itch.io.

Even typing documents. Typing in this textarea in HN is way easier than typing was on my Atari 800 in Atariwriter and the moment I press "add comment" it's published for all to see. Same with twitter/facebook/google docs/blogger/wordpress. Consider how much work and how many people it would have taking to do anything similar in the 80s. Write document, typeset document, get printer to print 1000s of copies, mail them to people, have mail people carry and deliver them....

Contacting people in general and being able to send them documents, photos, videos, is free and trival today. Would have taken 10s of people and days to weeks just 40 yrs ago.

Maybe "jobs" in general have not but lots of things have gotten incredibly easy, raising what is possible to produce (in otherwords, be productive)

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