On the other hand productivity in the developing world has been spiking markedly.
Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
531–540 of 603 posts
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#532I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly lin…
“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich”””” You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average. Total wealth is created by productivity and is th…
The way "productivity" is calculated is fundamentally flawed though, making it a flawed metric to discuss or use.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/01/17/debunking-the...
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The acceleration, ride comfort, features This is not true at all. Ride comfort and features is massively improved in todays cars compared to 1950. Or to 1980. That goes for both the driver and passenger.
Depends on what you want in a car and what you mean by ride comfort. Very few cars made today ride as smoothly as a 1970-80 land yachts made by Cadillac and Lincoln for example. Also, many newer cars are unrepairable without special equipment and some don’t even provide service manuals to owners. Good luck getting your Tesla fixed quickly while traveling in remote locations versus a traditional car. Good luck finding…
> Very few cars made today ride as smoothly as a 1970-80 land yachts made by Cadillac and Lincoln for example.
Active (electromagnetic) suspension systems are a huge improvement over the 1970-80 land yachts that couldn't corner to save their lives.
Better yet, you can adapt your suspension system to ride however you want.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#534Earlier 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…
> 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. Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consi…
> Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consider owning an ICE car.
Nope, sorry. An electric car is still just a car, not some revolutionary different thing. It gets you from A to be exactly the same, the only difference is you plug it in at night rather than visiting a gas station.
> I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right
Nope, sorry. A car is an order of magnitude faster, have far longer range, haul more than a horse and buggy.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but a person can write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word. How many millions of dev-hours have been expended on stuff that fundamentally doesn't do anything new ? Edit: saying they don't do anything new isn't right. They do, especially with regards to collaboration. What I really mean is that they don't make the essential task -- the actual writing -- much easier. Th…
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.
More likely, multiple people got in a small room together and wrote it all out. Faster, less hassle, better collaboration and idea generation.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the context of the question being posted electric cars don’t move the needle for productivity. I spent three glorious days with a Tesla performance M3 in Texas recently. The driving experience is, for me, unparalleled. But it was definitely not more productive by any metric I’d use.
Never going to the gas station? The fact that the per-mile cost is much lower? Isn't that pretty much the definition of productivity?
> Never going to the gas station?
Not a big deal. And on long trips with an electric car, don't you have to plan around relatively extended stops at (currently) relatively rare charging stations?
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Personally I try to turn GPS off as much as possible but I also frequently consult it even for routes that I know well. I'm not saying it's not useful. I'm just saying it's not as big of an advance as it's being made out to be. > And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there. I've above clarified, but my "garbage" comment was not referring to maps, but other kinds of material you'd fine online. Maps are…
I went on a trip across Europe without checking any maps in advance and without any maps in my car. Multiple times. I never visited those countries before and arrived at precise locations, on time, without any kind of error. For me that’s incredible and very reliable. Thousand of kilometers to arrive in a place I’ve never been before without memorizing the road in advance is innovation. My dad never could’ve done tha…
Reading this comment and most of the thread, what is missing is the human part of the experience. GPS directions are terrific, indeed, but you are choosing (by not "checking any maps in advance") to completely pass up the opportunity to explore, to wander, to discover.
You went all the way to Europe and didn't even look at a map? You could have been 100 yards from some amazing place and never even known it. Your dad never would have done that.
Technology has generally eliminated the worst scenarios -- getting totally lost or stranded -- but also generally eliminated the best -- discovering something new, an unexpected detour. I can also speak from experience and say that I barely remember the trips in which every detail was planned and executed exactly according to plan. The times when I was lost, or had no place to sleep, often turned out to be the best and most memorable trips of my life. Actually being forced to interact with other human beings has its upsides.
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? What kind of new social structures are enabling progress in this way?
New forms of government, larger and more complicated corporations, public schooling, labor unions, global shipping routes, universities, remote work, wikipedia, internet forums, open-source software development, stock markets, etc etc. None of these required a genetic change in the individuals involved, just a "memetic" change in the way the individuals acted, communicated, and thought.
horizontal transfer via memetics is not guaranteed to be a productive or stabilizing force in the long term, it could be convincingly argued many of our nastiest problems today derive from immaturity in handling novel forms of information flow and hybrid agency enabled by modern social and physical technology
the task, imo, is to remove memetic agency from the driver's seat and put ourselves back in it, or if we want a chauffeur at least to make sure it's taking us into a viable future
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#539Because 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…
>The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.
You're about half as likely to die in a car crash as you were 30 years ago. It's incremental, but not hedonistic.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...
Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, it's walking around zero, since the trend is a line. The rate of change is neither decreasing nor increasing in linear terms. But, anyway, that's GDP per capita. Data for productivity is much less available, but here is some for the US alone (that's the change annualized): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=PRS85006092 , Notice that the rate of change itself (first derivative) stays for ages around 0.
I guess we're really talking about the first derivative of PRODUCTIVITY_GROWTH in the formula GDP/CAP(t) = GDP/CAP(t-1) * (1 + PRODUCTIVITY_GROWTH(t)).