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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?

#251

Post by systemvoltage »

contingencies wrote: post #245
systemvoltage wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, instead of critiqueing and truly reflecting on what went wrong, and what to do to fix it; technologists are obsessed with over-praising of how things have gotten better. It misses the point that "We could have done a lot better" if we weren't so stagnant. America was a powerhouse of innovation in 1950-1970 both in private and public sectors. The progress was impossibly exponential. First step is admission of…

Real progress requires largely-uninterrupted time, space and adequate resources, cannot be readily predicted and is inherently risky. By outsourcing higher thought to the private sector, progress without immediate commercial application has been grossly disincentivized and I would argue the prerequisite culture has been lost. A 15-bit computer[0] brought us to the moon, whereas this time awash with 64 bit mobile supe…

Yup, most of the talent has left, retired or flat out moved off of the area of research.

What I’m hopeful about is some new innovation happening in certain corners. Companies such as SpaceX, often made fun by people that are resentful as “Cowboys”, forget that the entire Apollo program was more “Cowboy” than anything SpaceX is doing today.

Read “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz if anyone is interested in the old school Cowboy culture of NASA. Warning: It might make you an optimist.

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

#252

Post by nanomonkey »

Speak for yourself. I feel like I have riches of new tech at my disposal.

Currently have 10 gbs fiber internet for $45/month, in one second I can download the contents of my first hard drive. My laptop has 64gb of ram and 8tb of ssd. I don't even know what to do with that much compute as I mostly use Emacs and Firefox for everything. Meetings are completely online, so I no longer need to travel to visit other offices to exchange data.

My phone is an embarrassment of riches, it covers most of my digital needs (music, hd video, note taking, internet, email, etc.) but is mostly ignored because it's really just a distraction.

In the garage, a tig welder, cnc mill, vacuum casting table, burn out kiln and countless other tools. Due to the previously mentioned internet connection I can watch videos that teach me how to use all of this equipment. Most of the software to run the CNC mill, do CAD design or CAM is all open source and free.

I can also purchase solar panels, heat pumps, lithium iron phosphate battery banks for ridiculously low costs compared to what I would have had to spend back in the 90s when I first wanted to get off the grid.

All in all, it's all there for us to live the solar punk lifestyle we've all wanted...just takes doing it.

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

#253

Post by tablespoon »

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…

> 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.

Honestly, it seems like you're just picking some incremental or marginal technological changes that happened, then promoting them to something more fundamental than they really are. Electric cars? Come on. They're barely even a change from a consumer perspective. Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

And some of those other things are debatable. For instance: I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything (e.g. by picking weird routes that were marginally faster but very difficult to systematize). [Edit: The following is about non-map online information.] The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.

Sufficiently advanced marketing is indistinguishable from technological progress.

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

#254

Post by chrisco255 »

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…

GPS is nice and all, but I would not say we move vastly differently compared to 30 years ago or even 70 years ago (basically, since interstate highways were developed). And electric motors are just a horizontal change in technology. They may have better acceleration than ICEs, but we're still going to be fundamentally traveling the same way. Only if and when self-driving becomes a thing, or personal drone transport vehicles become widespread, or cheap tunnels enabled by electric vehicles, would you be able to argue that a fundamental shift in how we move has occurred. That may be all just around the corner, or those dreams could go the way of the dream of the flying car in the 50s.

We definitely communicate vastly different than 30 years ago and prior.

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

#255

Post by rowanG077 »

amelius wrote: post #248
rowanG077 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you mean by async programming. If you literally mean async and await as available in Haskell, Rust, C#, JS, Python etc. Then no that's definitely not the same thing as windows 3.1's cooperative multitasking.

The async and await is just syntactic sugar that makes you more addicted to it.

The syntactic sugar is the entire point. If you don't have it it just sucks as a technology.

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

#256

Post by marginalia_nu »

rowanG077 wrote: post #235
marginalia_nu wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The limit is human perception. I couldn't disagree more. The general choppiness a modern application has is noticeable by literally everyone. I'm so bothered by it that I even went back to a wired mouse recently because the latency of my bluetooth mouse made me uneasy. And another point is that VR is rewriting entire technology stacks JUST to get lower latencies, precisely because a lot of people just get sick if i…

We had low latency input and smooth animation 30 years ago. The latency and lag of modern user interfaces is all in the layers and layers of software. It's especially noticeable when you look at like NES games and the like, they ran at 50 or 60 FPS (depending on PAL or NTSC) and typically had zero input lag (unless there was some sprite limit being exceeded). Modern games at 50 FPS are so sluggish you feel like you've downed a full bottle of wine or something. The difference is the time it takes to render a frame today, which can be 100ms or more, especially when the GPU is struggling.

But what I meant was like pixel density and so on. My screen is a lot higher resolution than it was 20 years ago, but it doesn't actually display much more information as my ability to actually resolve fine details has if anything worsened with the years. My screen is farther away and my font size higher, that's the big difference.

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

#257

Post by diego_moita »

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…

> Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth

A fantastic book!

But give it up. You tried but you can't explain that argument in a few paragraphs in a social network. That's a level of intelligence that is simply not possible here.

Just look at the answers you got. You (and Gordon) talk about changes in the fundamental, in the daily routines of everyday life, in the organization of life, cities and markets. However almost all answers here completely miss that point and go: "but product X is so much better now!".

They'd need to read Gordon's book to grasp it.

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

#258

Post by bovermyer »

nanomonkey wrote: post #252

Speak for yourself. I feel like I have riches of new tech at my disposal. Currently have 10 gbs fiber internet for $45/month, in one second I can download the contents of my first hard drive. My laptop has 64gb of ram and 8tb of ssd. I don't even know what to do with that much compute as I mostly use Emacs and Firefox for everything. Meetings are completely online, so I no longer need to travel to visit other offices…

But humans are still limited. Until we accelerate our evolution, we'll be stuck at the speed of glaciers in terms of our potential.

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

#259

Post by metadat »

nanomonkey wrote: post #252

Speak for yourself. I feel like I have riches of new tech at my disposal. Currently have 10 gbs fiber internet for $45/month, in one second I can download the contents of my first hard drive. My laptop has 64gb of ram and 8tb of ssd. I don't even know what to do with that much compute as I mostly use Emacs and Firefox for everything. Meetings are completely online, so I no longer need to travel to visit other offices…

If you have the means, it's nice.

Where is this mythical $45/mo. 10gbps fiber connect?

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

#260

Post by Retric »

kareemsabri wrote: post #205
Retric wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was vacuums etc have gotten a lot better over time. Electric motors are noticeably lighter, more powerful, and more energy efficient today. Yes vacuums in the 1980’s worked but they where significantly heavier, louder, and far more power hungry not to mention more expensive. It might not seem like much but I remember the exhaust from the family vacuum being noticeably warm. It’s even more noticeable with co…

I don't think that was the point. The OP said "we have [them]", not "they've gotten better". I agree, Dyson is quite a bit better than the vacuum my parents had (though central vac was pretty damn good). Dishwashers are quieter, though not that different. Microwaves seem about the same.

Fair enough, though convection microwaves are a real improvement. Traditional microwaves meanwhile cost about 1/10th as much as an 80’s microwave which is noticeable in it’s own way.
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