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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?

#151

Post by Quinner »

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…

30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use electric motors instead of internal combustion engines.

One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look around for reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing cabinets. If you wanted to know more about something, you probably had to go to a library, which might not even have a book on the topic (maybe if you were particularly determined to know the answer you'd wait a few weeks for an ILL).

Its a bit sad to me that you look at this enormous sea change in how we interact with the world and see Angry Birds.

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

#152

Post by thewarrior »

gowld wrote: post #100
thewarrior wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bott…

Services are also productivity.

Yes but only to an extent. We cannot have an economy only of rappers and influencers.

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

#154

Post by lotsofpulp »

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?

Yes. Even the cheapest house built to code will be noticeably better than one from 1980s. The quality of materials, technology of materials, wiring, plumbing, flooring, insulation, etc will all be better.

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

Not true, for similar reasons as above. Name a 2022 Corolla equivalent that could be purchased in the 1980s, safety, fuel efficiency, and reliability wise, at a similar inflation adjusted price. No 1980s car will even come close, and that is just for the most basic car today.

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

#155

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #131
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.

what you're missing is customer numbers. If you go from 20 servers to 200, and have 100x the customers, that's a massive win.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

Quinner wrote: post #151
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…

30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use electric motors instead of internal combustion engines. One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look…

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by meow_mix »

When I think about the productivity adds from tech from the last 20 years, I'm often left wondering why we aren't working less .

Others have mentioned us navigating faster, having neat new gadgets, etc, but fundamentally what I and many others want is more free time

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

#158

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Personal computers have become a distraction, like TV sets. People watching TV are generally not very productive.1 Before the internet we referred to TV as "the opiate of the masses".2 Not only do we now have a worse figurative opiate than TV in the form of today's www,3 we have the legalisation of literal opiates for the masses thanks to Purdue Pharma.

1 A plaintiff's lawyer specialising in class action securities fraud litigation might be one exception. He might be watching CNBC and drafting a new complaint at the same time. :)

2 https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,809673...

3 Circa 1996 https://github.com/mikemurr/nc110/blob/master/scripts/web

"The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!"

I am still using original netcat every day to deal with the dismal kludges band-aided together, now run by pinheads. Although I use scripts I write myself instead of those of the author, netcat's simplicity, portability and reliability over 26 years is one of the few things I still enjoy about the www. In the rare chance he still uses the www and reads HN, thank you Mr Walker for one of the best programs ever written, not to mention the entertaining source code comments.

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

#159

Post by hnthrowawy »

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…

your "simple equation" is completely inadequate. When a company improves their efficiency they don't just cut a check "to the billionaires"

If it is causing share price increases, every shareholder benefits. Why are you excluding millionaires?

> 5,671,005 US households have a net worth of $3 million or more

There's another 16T right there, minimum.

The companies in S&P 500 hold another 1.5T in cash

Presumably there are workers at these companies being rewarded handsomely for these productivity gains, how do you account for that wealth?

The housing market in California grew 1.4T last year, now sitting at over 9T total "value".

This is just first thoughts for my envelope math. Looking at "billionaires" is overly simplistic

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