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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?

#461

Post by j245 »

tablespoon wrote: post #315
scarface74 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is, a couple of anecdotes don’t prove the rule. You might not find GPS useful, but a lot of people find it immensely useful and revolutionary.

If your use case is travelling to a new place once or twice and never again, there is no point memorising the route / area.

Memorising a route doesn’t help you figure out there is an accident on the route, or unusually heavy traffic.

I don’t disagree with you about memorising common routes and learning about your local area, it’s a good thing to do imo. It’s just no longer required because technology is good enough to let you get by without having to do that.

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

#462

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #154
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…

Everything in modern home construction is about minimizing labor and material costs. That involves major cutbacks on quality as well. Whatever corner cutting a builder can get away with will be done.

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

#463

Post by mypastself »

Per the article, productivity has been growing at 1% a year for the past decade, compared to 3% in the decades prior. So the headline is misleading, technology is making us more productive, just not at the same rate as in the years before.

The author claims this is worrisome, but his reasoning seems flawed to me:

> a less productive economy is a smaller one with fewer resources to deal with social challenges like inequality

But again, we are not getting “less productive”, it’s the increase in productivity that’s getting slower.

The author then presumably wants to make us as productive as possible as soon as possible to solve this particular issue. His preferred candidate for this seems to be AI. The remainder of the article essentially an ad for advances in that specific technology.

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

#464

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

diordiderot wrote: post #166
lotsofpulp wrote: post #154

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? 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…

I read something along the lines of 'a stock 2020 Camero is faster than a 2000 Ferrari' with fewer cylinders

Most name brand supercars are just dumping fuel into the engine and making it sound impressive. They don't have the engineering prowess to develop a refined power train like a big manufacturer. Nowadays emissions regulations force them to team up with a more competent player which is why the least sucky Huracan is the R8.

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

#465

Post by usrbinbash »

What "new technology" are we talking about exactly?

Because new technology as in better robots, better medical/agricultural/transportation technology, better network tech, better electronics, more efficient power generation technology, faster chips, improved algorithms for things like logistics etc. etc. HAVE made us much more productive.

The problem is, as with almost all developments that actually matter for our progress as a species, these things kinda fly under the radar. They just work in the background, keeping the ship afloat. They usually don't get big shiny sparkly stage presentations. They are, simultaneously, the most important things happening to our technological and scientific progress, and the most ignored.

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

#466

Post by pmontra »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #206
jbay808 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality seems to go through ups and downs, probably in line with economic cycles and periods of scarcity. Here, houses built in the 20s and earlier were made with high quality lumber that is scarcely available these days. I notice that rebuilders and renovations of these old houses are careful to maintain the base wood layers even when they completely strip the facing and almost everything else.

Also, there are billions more people who demand wood for their shelter. Is it reasonable to expect that quality of wood, which I assume is almost purely a function of time, to maintain the same accessibility?

I'm not sure that billions of people build houses with wood. It's definitely an American thing, Europe not so much (bricks and concrete.) China is concrete. India? South America? Mexico? Africa?

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

#467

Post by systemvoltage »

asah wrote: post #250
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…

bogus! I was there, and let me tell you, I get so much more done each day, it's shocking: - cellphones, the internet and GPS saves insane amounts of time coordinating RL events. I'm never gonna get back the 1000+ hours I spent with paper maps trying to find places, playing "phone tag" coordinating activities, etc. Kids these days, they just have no idea. - remote work & learning = 2+ hours PER DAY. I used to pay $500…

I am not convinced by this lengthy rebuttal, in fact it just solidified OP's point.

OP/Thiel's point: It's not that we haven't made any progress, but rather the progress since the cold war has been disappointing.

I'm a bit ambivalent about Globalisation and whether that can be considered progress. We globalized several times (Early trade routes, 14th century, British empire and then again in post-modern era).

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

#468

Post by Uehreka »

malloryerik wrote: post #269
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…

> If you missed a turn, god help you. People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.

> Just check the map

Ah yes, “just” check the map. When I was a kid if my Mom made a wrong turn on a way to a doctor’s appointment a few counties over (I got sick a lot as a kid) I’d have to reach under my seat and figure out which of the multiple paper map books corresponded to where we were. Until GPS I had no visual sense of “where we were” when we were out of my town (I don’t understand the “relying on GPS makes you worse at navigating” people), so I was basically useless at reading or interpreting the maps. Mom would need to pull over, but that meant finding some way to get off the unfamiliar highway we’d just turned onto, which could take a few minutes (or more, if the exit we took put us on another highway).

So now we’re several minutes off course, flipping through the pages in this other county’s map, trying to figure out how to get to a doctor’s office in a building whose parking lot has a one-way entrance that’s in the back, but first we’re low on gas and need to find a gas station that hasn’t closed down since the maps were printed.

And then suddenly, we got this GPS thing, and this awful fixture of my childhood was gone. “Getting lost” just stopped being a thing around the mid-2000s. Screw the 1950s, 1990s me would find the current status of driving to be an unimaginable utopia.

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

#469

Post by systemvoltage »

torginus wrote: post #405
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…

And to bring the analogy into the realm of computing, I feel like progress isn't lightning fast here either. I just watched this video of Office 3.0 from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsTydF09hbg This looks and feels like the Office I use everyday. Likewise, I feel like the changes in the realm of software development, a purportedly fast moving, tech and investment heavy industry, have been a mix of sidegrade…

Dall-E, AlphaGo/Chess is serious progress. Hyperfuturistic even.

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

#470

Post by aj7 »

In evaluating stocks, I always view a well-written analysis that is signed by a person who has obviously put some honest work into it, and I know, from my own research TO BE OBVIOUSLY WRONG, as an extremely bullish indicator for that stock. Put more simply, if a smart person gives one or more COMPLETELY WRONG reasons for avoiding a stock, buy it. Treat this article in a similar vein. Moreover, I remember articles in the 80s, with an almost identical analysis about how Windows PC’s, which were by then ubiquitous, also lead to zero productivity growth. What happens is that the new technology is extremely productive to a group of experts, who aren’t particularly interested in disseminating their proprietary advantages. Eventually, “regular programmers” are tasked with writing similar applications, the good ones of which spread like wildfire.
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