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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?

#271

Post by nwienert »

chrisco255 wrote: post #254
Quinner wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

I upgraded from a 95 4Runner to a 22 Outlander and it’s like a spaceship on wheels in comparison.

Literally every piece of the car is in a different class and the tech is insane that just didn’t exist then, I mean it basically drives itself. It’s dramatically safer, more efficient, comfier, faster, quieter.

I no longer hate long drives, they’re quite nice. The speakers are amazing and the road noise is basically gone. I can stream anything, talk to friends anywhere in the world while driving, massage and heat my back, and do it all with half the gas at a cost that’s equivalent to the 4Runner when it was new back then. It also goes 110 as comfortably as the 4Runner would do about 60, and breezes up hills that the latter would break a sweat on. I press a button for roadside assistance, I lock and start/stop it from my phone, I don’t have to bother with the key, the list just never ends.

Meanwhile a car from 1965 honestly is a lot more similar to a 95 than a 95 to today.

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

#272

Post by fieldcny »

majewsky wrote: post #234
tunesmith wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your last sentence is unnecessary. What purpose does it serve?

Once an argument has been laid out in detail, providing a poignant summary in one sentence leaves a more lasting impression on the reader.

So your argument is that all technical advancement in the last 50/60 years is just marketing?

That’s a pretty bold statement supported by literally nothing, just because you don’t feel like certain tech has added anything doesn’t mean it hasn’t.

Productivity is an incredibly hard thing to capture, especially with the move to away from manufacturing and physical production.

One could easily argue that the productivity numbers are failing to increase because technology has lowered the barriers to entry all over the world so now there’s more competition for every good and service creating pricing pressure on the “value of goods and services produced”

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

#273

Post by fieldcny »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #265
gcanyon wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> performs about the same as MS Word did on a 486 with a floppy Except (gdocs for comparison) I now can: 1. Effortlessly access the doc on multiple devices, wherever there is cell or WiFi. 2. See a visual history of every change I've ever made to the doc. 3. Collaborate with many other people in real time. 4. Easily incorporate images, tables, drawings, and other files. 5. Compare documents. 6. Use other character se…

Right, but how many things are actually central to document processing?

All of it, what do you think isn’t?

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

#275

Post by wruza »

rowanG077 wrote: post #255
amelius wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes green threads require no syntactic featutes at all, e.g. Lua coroutines. You yield() through the stack and resume() back when “done”.

  local data = readfile("file1”)
  writefile("file2", data)
The above example may have async/await-ed two times without any sugar. I believe that’s exactly what coop-mt code would look like (but at the lower level, because of hw stack instead of heap-based), Tbf I never did that in windows 3.x, do I miss something?

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

#276

Post by marcosdumay »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #118
marcosdumay wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, for the lazy, there's a nice summary here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... I've pre-selected a few lines because the problem is supposed to exist on the data of rich countries. You can deselect them at the blue bar at the top of the page (it's not obvious). I couldn't cut the data in any way that showed the issue ever existed. There is an half decade long decrease on the wealth o…

The graph looks linear. If productivity gains were increasing (or even staying constant), you'd expect it to be more than linear. This implies the rate of productivity change is decreasing.

Hum, ok, you expect an exponential growth in productivity. Any reason why?

Anyway, talk about an underspecified issue. The article simply has no claim at all of how they expect productivity to behave, just that it's not following the expectation.

The one productivity problem I'm aware about is about it not growing at all for decades, just moving on a noisy horizontal. It's relevant that the GDP per capita follows a different curve. That means that people are working more and adding less value by work-hour.

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

#277

Post by _carbyau_ »

commandlinefan wrote: post #148
jacobedawson wrote: post #143

Another poster compared 1890 to 1950 - jumping from one to the other would be obviously shocking, from 1960 - 2020 perhaps less-so, physically. Still, I find it amazing that in 2022, I: - Work from home via the internet with people I've never met - Visit places I've never been in simulated 3D to build familiarity - Receive exact routes to virtually anywhere from a computer in my pocket - Video call with my family in…

I'm still inclined to mostly agree with OP who said that a visitor from 1880 to 1950 would be far more in awe than a visitor from 1950 to 2020, but it is funny sometimes how incredulous my kids are when I tell them that, for example, there was literally no way to open up a device that told you where you were when I was growing up.

Not a device but maps were a thing. I recall riding a motorbike with a backpack half filled with a book of maps. Heavy to have in a backpack for hours on end.

Also, before mobile phones at all, just meeting up with people required more time and you had to be specific. Now, get in the area and if you don't see them, message or call.

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

#278

Post by AussieWog93 »

I've always wondered how much of this has to do with sweeping social changes that put people last.

Your average worker 50 years ago came home to a clean house, a homecooked meal on the table and an expectation of stability (both at work and at home). To "win" at life, all the engineer would need to do was engineer things to the highest standard.

Now, the average worker is competing with their spouse, competing with their colleagues, optimising a path between 15 different companies because that's the only path to rise the ranks, all with the constant threat that the rug could be pulled out from underneath them at any time with minimal warning.

Point is, the game we're playing now is different.

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

#279

Post by arcticbull »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #228
arcticbull wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Performance has improved dramatically, but latency went up too.

I don't think I've ever had computer with lower latency in any application than when using my M1 Pro MacBook. Sure, it's 20 years of hardware innovation, but at least someone is doing something right.

Keyboard button press to screen response is ~100ms whereas an Apple IIe was 35ms.

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

#280

Post by fieldcny »

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.

And your house doesn’t burn to the ground every time there’s a short in the system
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