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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?

#541

Post by danans »

pixl97 wrote: post #365
danans wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously he was referring to the existence of conveniences of the homes (dishwashers, laundry machines), not how they were built or the finishings. There have been very few big changes in how homes are built since that time. A little more insulation, and they've gotten even bigger, but they are otherwise pretty static.

Ok, with unlimited power what would you change with your home?

I did change it. Some things were incremental (bomber air sealing and insulation) and some were quantum leapy (house wide heat recovery ventilation with smoke and particulate filtering, which was necessitated by the incremental advances).

The other quantum leaps are multiple electrical appliances participating in demand response programs that are helping to balance the electric grid from the demand side.

What I wish I could do (constrained by space, finances, or technology)

- Geothermal heat pump

- Vertical modularity

- Neighborhood microgrid

- Rainwater capture

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

#542

Post by systemvoltage »

MrMan wrote: post #499
systemvoltage wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

thiel gave us a payments company, a shitty hedge fund and a government contractor doing consulting work. not to be reductionist, but his complaining doesn't register for me at all. for god's sake he tries to get people to quit Stanford to start businesses that necessarily can only coast on previous achievements, instead of doing science.

I never understood this kind of vitriol against Thiel. The media has been smearing his image because he didn’t fit into the mold of their political agenda.

I suggest listening to his interviews with a completely open mind and thinking on your own. I sometimes disagree with him but in no way he is evil/satanic as media portrays him. Sad.

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

#543

Post by philosopher1234 »

somenameforme wrote: post #406
philosopher1234 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would that skill be useful to me? I’ve never needed it in my entire life. You sound like a Luddite.

I think this is a risky side to take. Consider that your argument isn't all that far from a kid wondering why they should learn math. After all if they ever needed to use it, they could just use a calculator, like the one they bought from the clerk who whipped our her trusty calculator to determine how much change to give for the 120 coin calculator that was paid for with 200 coins. Navigational skills are likely not…

Oh, when is this GPS ending war coming? Also, I didn't realize I had scheduled a tour of Death Valley, when was that again?

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

#544

Post by amelius »

UncleMeat wrote: post #521
amelius wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And structured programming is just sugar over GOTOs. Polymorphism is just sugar over type inspection and branching. Recursion-free function calls are just sugar over variable renaming and text movement.

Correct, but that misses the point, which is that async programming is NOT sugar over the more powerful approach of preemptive multitasking (introduced in Windows sometime after version 3.1).

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

#545

Post by hammyhavoc »

nosianu wrote: post #483
nwienert wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a horribly myopic take, it completely changes the "outcomes". I am way more productive and happy: - I save more money so I have more to spend towards productive uses. - I don't die as often, living is productive. - I listen to podcasts, diverse videos (just listening) or music, learning more during my drive. - I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more. - The car drives for me, leavi…

To get to your conclusion you ignore 99% of what my comment si about and concentrate on a single thing, cars. I don't like these kinds of arguments where people carefully select one minor thing and pretend it's the main point. I wrote about quite ab bit more, and cars were not even close to the center of my post! > I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more. I also question the validity o…

Just my perspective:

I don't feel like I know my friends or family very well these days, despite being friends for almost thirty years with some.

Twenty years ago we would talk on MSN or email and arrange to do something or hang out. These days you just see photos of their lunch.

I also feel like a lot of folks are scared to hang out, even pre-COVID, because they have nothing to talk about that isn't already on Facebook. What they do discuss is pretty much solely consumption of "I ate x", "I bought y".

I largely feel like folks have lost the art of conversation. Instead they're now content creators.

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

#546

Post by hammyhavoc »

nwienert wrote: post #493
cudgy wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually everything you mentioned has nothing to do with the point that was so eloquently stated by the above poster.

> The main point though is that you don't accomplish more And I pointed out ~10 ways I do accomplish more because of it, refuting exactly the point. The rest of the comment cites a ridiculous one-off, narrow social science study with a few vague pathic appeals to the quaint simplicity of the before-fore-times. I think you both want to zoom way-way out to 10-guy "like, what does accomplish even really mean? Isn't simp…

Laptops were much easier to maintain twenty years ago. The idea of a Framework would not be much of a novelty. Most decent laptops had swappable batteries, and both the RAM and CPU were socketed instead of soldered.

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

#547

Post by hammyhavoc »

cudgy wrote: post #495
nfbyte wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be hard-pressed to find such an accurate and comprehensive reference on that topic anywhere on the internet You can find The Art of Electronics on the internet... And you can put it on an old tablet with dozens of other reference books.

However, you can’t read it without electricity to charge the battery and an internet connection. The device you read it on distracts you with notifications, emails, and other communications. You cannot easily scribe notes in the margins or easily flip between two pages that have related information. The device you read it on costs $1000 and must be replaced by every few years due to operating system obsolescence. You…

$1000? Try $100 for an Android e-ink device. No notifications, WiFi is only on for 10 minutes from enabling to preserve battery life.

Furthermore, plenty of stores sell you files to consume however you want.

Oh and e-ink works fine in sunlight and lasts weeks without charging. And FYI, there's plenty of notetaking systems.

My partner and I have been using these e-ink devices for almost five years. Works fine. No replacement required thus far. It is a specialized version of Android.

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

#548

Post by dredmorbius »

spupe wrote: post #491
dredmorbius wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Noted, FYI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31500807

You wrote above: > Gordon's point is that the best commercial-grade service ... didn't move much in the seventy-eight years* from 1936--2014. It's been nearly another decade and that story's largely the same. The fact that total passenger miles has been largely flat since 2000 (is that even accurate? [1]) has no bearing on that claim. Furthermore, the number of passengers has basically tripled in the last 20 years al…

There are two separate questions under consideration here.

One is the capabilities of commercial general aviation air travel in terms of total elapsed travel time.

The second is the general commercial utilisation of air travel.

In the case of the first, advances in aircraft speed have been all but entirely offset by increased frictions in other parts of the air transport system. 2014 travel between NYC and Chicago is only barely faster than it was over 80 years ago. Moreover, aircraft speed is flat or declining since the late 1950s and the introduction of jet-powered aircraft.

The cost side is based on economics and other factors. In part, it is a question of both supply and demand. Costs have fallen through technological efficiencies; jet engines of today are roughly as efficient as propellor engines of the 1950s, not merely faster as was initially the case. They've also fallen through nonaeronotical advances: more efficient booking, higher seating utilisation, tighter seating spacing, and the like.

Statista's data extend only to 2007. Gordon gives data to the 1940s.

Among the big surprises to me a few years back was that peak avaiation fuel (at least through the mid-2010s) had occurred by 2000. Total passenger miles increased, but only through much higher load factors.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings... (Search for "aviation fuel usage data".)

http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast...

Gordon's data show inflation-adjusted passenger price per mile as essentially flat since 1990. Given miles travelled is a function of price per mile ... a similar relationship holds. Rise and Fall, p. 401.

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

#549

Post by dredmorbius »

areyousure wrote: post #523
dredmorbius wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gordon notes that air passenger miles are effectively an inverse relation to costs. Lower costs -> more passengers. Total passenger miles have been largely flat since 2000. Total departures actually fell during the aughts, along with jet fuel consumption. Some of that's due to more efficient flight booking (appropriately sized aircraft, higher seat utilisation), though a large share is decreased seat pitch, which is…

In case anyone is curious what "largely flat since 2000" looks like: https://www.economist.com/img/b/1280/670/90/sites/default/fi... https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16947.jpeg

Your first plot is of global, not US airline traffic.

Global incomes have risen, most notably in China.

I may have misread a chart or mis-remembered statistics. The Statista chart does show that the post-2000 trend in air travel is well below the 1990s trendline. Actual miles travelled would have been above 1 trillion had the former continued.

The more notable chart of Gordon's does indeed show price per passenger mile, not total miles (p. 401, Rise and Fall).

It's also often useful to think of travel not as miles but as time. Given an average train speed of about 30 mph, and aircraft of about 450 mph, the time per person per travel mode is nearly identical: 1.3 vs. 1.6 billion hours.

People take trains. They don't take them as far as they do aircraft.

Auto travel works out to about 12 billion hours, again assuming 30 mph average speed. That's about 10 minutes per person per day.

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

#550

Post by passivate »

tablespoon wrote: post #253
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…

> 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…

>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.

I don't agree at all. Especially in the sciences, the collaboration across countries over the internet has been tremendous. The ability to instantly know what papers are being published in your field and use their results to further your own research can't be overstated. We rely on that to do our work at our company. But going back to tech, the ability to do open source projects _at all_ wouldn't have been possible before. The interconnected nature reduces 'local maximas' of knowledge, skill and expertise. I have learnt so many things from watching youtube DIY channels that I otherwise would never have in my own local community.

And so I ask - What makes your claim "probably true"?

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