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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?

#311

Post by DANK_YACHT »

marcosdumay wrote: post #276
DANK_YACHT wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I don’t have an expectation. The article is essentially asking why is the second derivative of productivity negative despite increased technological advancement. I’m just pointing out that your graph shows that the second derivative of productivity is indeed negative.

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

#312

Post by throw__away7391 »

unchocked wrote: post #297
nwienert wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A 95 4Runner restored to like new condition would be an excellent ride today, Gad mileage notwithstanding. Run out vs. new is a straw man w/r/t/ old tech vs new.

I haven't owned a car in well over a decade, but new cars in the 80s and 90s were just trash compared to the 2000s, and aside from the absence of manual transmissions and some models putting too many features behind touch-screens they only seem to have gotten better.

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

#313

Post by burnished »

fieldcny wrote: post #272
majewsky wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you may have replied to the wrong person? Your comment is on topic for the tree, but doesn't appear to apply at all to the person you directly replied to.

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

#314

Post by mymythisisthis »

analog31 wrote: post #214
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…

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 marg…

I read a small municipal report from the early 1980s, and it was so refreshing to read; very slim, got to the point. Probably because somehow had to type it by hand, so anything not useful was edited out. By the late 1980s in offices and the early 90s at home, it became too easy to copy+paste. Document lengths spiraled out of control.

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

#315

Post by tablespoon »

scarface74 wrote: post #286
tablespoon wrote: post #253

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. Honestly, it seems like you're just picking some incremental o…

Saying you personally stopped using GPS when most people do is as akin to the old meme, “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 10 years”.

> Saying you personally stopped using GPS when most people do is as akin to the old meme, “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 10 years”.

No it isn't. I moved to a new city and realized after a couple years that I still barely knew my way around. I then correctly diagnosed that the cause was the overuse of turn-by-turn directions. You're trying to frame it as some hipster cooler-than-thou thing, when it isn't.

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

#316

Post by jdauriemma »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #236
humanrebar wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaborative editing is an essential task in my job. Go back twenty years and folks were emailing copies of copies of drafts back and forth. Today, two authors use two keyboards and two screens and just type. That's very different.

The vast majority of the world is still doing the emailing back and forth method.

Source?

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

#317

Post by dredmorbius »

fieldcny wrote: post #280
humanistbot wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That was not happening as a matter of course in the 1980s.

The basic mechanism to reduce such risks was established in the '80s.

The 1880s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization)

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

#318

Post by lmm »

bluGill wrote: post #296
lr4444lr wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of that is consumption, though. I don't want to knock consumption, but it's not productivity.

Consumption is directly related to production. If I was willing to live on the minimum I could have retired after only a couple years. People retire at 65 now like before, but with a lot more stuff their additional productivity gave them. People seem to like it, so the argument that they shouldn't have so much junk is a bit flat.

Is all that extra stuff making them happier? Or are they just acquiring it to keep up with their neighbours? Maybe someone who retired early on the minimum would genuinely be less happy, but only because of seeing how much "better off" everyone else was.

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

#319

Post by bergenty »

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…

You’re making it sound very simplistic but those screens are a whole new world that enable us to do an incredible number of things— from all the knowledge in the world at your fingertips, to very cheap and ubiquitous communication, shopping on demand, GPS, entertainment, learning, creativity from music to videos to graphics, simulations of real world situations etc. Our electricity is coming from renewable resources, there’s more social egalitarianism, countries across the world have gone from undeveloped world to much, much higher levels of development, air travel is significantly more accessible to everyone, we’re on the cusp of an general AI, space is more accessible, we can genetically modify our DNA and on and on.

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

#320

Post by angarg12 »

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.

I'm not sure what part of my comment made you draw that conclusion. This was a science team and we used servers mostly for scientific computations. Sysadmins jobs was to operate and maintain the servers e.g. make jobs run, upgrade, patch, fix, etc.

Virtualization massively simplified this, and automation decreased human intervention. With 250 we were definitely running bigger tasks faster e.g. a project that required 3 months of computing now takes 2 weeks instead.

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