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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?

#211

Post by lovich »

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?

I see this come up as a gotcha every time redistribution of wealth is ever discussed, but surprisingly the left can be just a nationally minded as anyone else.

I’d be concerned with involving those people in the calculation when we’re under the same political body. As long as we’re in separate nation states that’s kind of an in house issue they need to decide on how they want to deal with it

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

#212

Post by theteapot »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #203
vkou wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Emotional intelligence is still intelligence. You need high EQ to be a good salesman. So still on the right side of the bell curve.

Different bell curve.

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

#214

Post by analog31 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #129
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 perform…

I actually think we reached peak word processing. The only word processed documents that I ever see are things that nobody will ever read, such as HR announcements, functional procedures, and dissertations. Today, more people write in the e-mail editor or chat app. Even students no longer need word processing. When my kids were in grade school, they were required to follow formatting standards that included page margins, for documents that would never be printed. Today, they use whatever cloud editor is convenient.

I wonder how much of today's software is designed to make us more productive or efficient, by helping us manage... software?

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

#215

Post by wallfacer »

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…

Tough choice between Soap and hot takes on HN :P

However, near-instant access to the entirety of humanities’ collective information vs a dishwasher? I’m fine washing dishes by hand.

Mapping a novel virus genome and formulating an RNA-based vaccine in mere weeks vs “look how many dams and bridges we can build”?

You know what happens when you compound incremental progress? Huge advancements.

Progress is real, and it’s only getting faster as exponential tech from the past few decades is just now hitting “whole numbers” and converging.

Of course, it’s not fundamentally inevitable, but the future is decided by the possible-ists.

Please take the time to read the latest works by Diamandis and Kotler, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, and Harari.

I cannot imagine your perspective will still be the same after so much history, theory, and real-world examples beyond the point by point counters you’re receiving as replies.

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

#216

Post by amelius »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #129
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 perform…

And the "async programming" that is advocated everywhere is still the same as Windows 3.1 cooperative multitasking, just with better branding.

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

#217

Post by lkrubner »

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…

Exactly. Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth spells out the details of what real innovation looks like. Peter Drucker used to make about the same point, putting the emphasis on the 60 years leading up to 1914, which he considered the most innovative 60 years in human history: photography, telephones, radio, electricity, the combustion engine and therefore cars and trucks, airplanes, the modern textile dye industry, the oil industry, the first plastics, mass production of cleaning solutions, sulfa drugs, the modern steel industry and therefore cheap steel, and therefore skyscrapers and larger boats, the wholesale reinvention of mathematics starting with group theory discovered or re-discovered from Gauss in the 1870s and then followed by the evolution towards set theory, not to mention the tensor calculus, Boolean logic, and statistics becoming part of science, Max Plank but also Albert Einstein, etc. The list is really too long.

At a slightly larger scale, there was what some historians refer to as a "secular boom" from the 1700s to the 1970s, and then since the 1970s we've seen the onset of what some call The Great Stagnation.

How this ends and what comes next is anyone's guess.

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

#218

Post by jrockway »

colechristensen wrote: post #191
lotsofpulp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Luxury” is simply a marketing term and has no importance. The relevant question is how do the cheapest materials today compares to the cheapest materials in the 1980s?

I dunno, spending $4000/mo in Mountain View, you tend to have a few expectations. (in other words, it is more or less impossible to rent anything of actual quality) The garbage materials of today didn't exist nearly as much in the 80s so they'd have to have used at least cheap solid wood instead of sawdust foam.

You're paying $3999/month for the land and $1/month for the building materials. The luxury is that you probably chose Mountain View so you can bike to your office, which is more enjoyable than driving.

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

#219

Post by smcleod »

Personally I've put it down to:

- We _are_ actually far more productive, but capitalism means that the demands, rewards and expectations have scaled along side - e.g. mass inflation, house prices etc... meaning we haven't been able (allowed) to scale back out working hours.

- We are increasingly living in a world of increase choice and consumption pressure - we have more options and pressure to obtain goods and services than ever before - this is often not a good thing.

- Diminishing returns as we ratchet up optimisation over time, technology becomes more complex over time, not less.

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

#220

Post by gitgud »

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…

> Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.

Innovation is driven by demand, and demand for faster travel times is mainly fueled by people wanting quicker business trips, not people on holidays.

Demand for business trips has waned dramatically due to the meteoric rise of video-conferencing. So businesses are spending less less time and money sending humans traveling around the world, which has had undeniable gains of productivity in businesses.

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