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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?

#571

Post by adwn »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #564
adwn wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, maybe. In practice? Something would have broken, or you'd have to fiddle with some settings, or you'd have to download the video (somehow) before you could play it in a standalone program – the experience would have been much less streamlined, at least. Also, which single cable would you have used to carry video and audio, and which could be plugged into a laptop and a TV?

> Something would have broken, or you'd have to fiddle with some settings I don't remember any trouble with screens or moving windows around or doing streaming video around that time. > Also, which single cable would you have used to carry video and audio, and which could be plugged into a laptop and a TV? Oh, I didn't realize you were suggesting the audio moved to the TV. Well HDMI came out a couple years later and…

> Well HDMI came out a couple years later and didn't really blow minds.

Of course not. All of those improvements were, taken on their own, iterative and evolutionary – as nearly all technological development is. But taken together, they make a big difference.

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

#572

Post by anfilt »

IshKebab wrote: post #509
anfilt wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makita made the first power tools running on batteries in 1978...

Yeah but they were pretty terrible until relatively recently.

Main problem with them was NiMh battery had a shorter battery life, and was easy to ruin. First lithium battery was made in 70s as well. First lithium ion was in mid 80s However till the 90s they were not really a commercially viable item to use in products. So its still 80s tech in some regards.

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

#573

Post by cudgy »

altcognito wrote: post #533
cudgy wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps. But the old Cadillac is/was much cheaper and who needs to race around corners in a land yacht. Those fancy new adjustable suspensions are notorious for failing and cost as much as the car to replace. Know someone that just sold their 5 year old car with one of these systems that failed due to the $5000 to repair out of warranty. Cadillac would be new shocks/struts on all four wheels and out the door for less than $1000 and these components rarely fail within 15 years.

Get a sports car for fast corners.

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

#574

Post by cudgy »

utrack wrote: post #569
cudgy wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent. Also, there were travel agents (a rare breed these days) who could assist with booking flights, hotels, and sightseeing. There seems to be advantages and disadvantages to each era. However, I largely consider technology advances to be rather unimpressive, especially services and apps built on the internet. Acces…

You can always come to the less technologically advanced country and haggle all you want. I'm in one of those countries right now, and believe me, it's a lot worse when you actually need to do that every time you try to use any service. After moving there I've started to appreciate a decent, frictionless, fixed price service a lot more.

I find some of these platforms to be far from frictionless. Try doing a basic sort based on price in AirBnb; it does not include the fees in the sorted price making it difficult to find the best deal. Many sites have false reviews that are manipulated to increase their ratings and push an undesirable hotel into a “deal” that hides the actually hotel for instance. Priceline, for example, is no longer the deal that it used to be and many of the actual hotel sites have better prices or match the ones on Priceline.

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

#575

Post by adhesive_wombat »

fieldcny wrote: post #268
lukeschlather wrote: post #262

Earlier 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. And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there. Last weekend I was frustrated that Google was unaware of a road reroute but that is leaps and bounds ahead of the days of paper maps. Yeah, there's a lot of garbage on the Internet but it's also remarkably easy to find high-quality informati…

I agree that GPS and maps/directions are a magnificent improvement. I remember what it was like to get lost, and be lost for hours, late at night nothing open, no one but unsavory characters out. I remember how hard long trips could be even with maps or trip-tiks from AAA (which were awesome) GPS enables all sort logistics, it allows transport companies to ensure trucks are driven safely, to know when and where goods…

It'll also route you around major delays if it can. This saved me a three hour tailback only weeks ago (arriving at work after lunch would have been...irritating) and literally last week I didn't bother to set it on the way home and ended up in 30 minutes of standing traffic that it would have told me to avoid (there's an alternate route that's 10 minutes slower, but once you're in the wrong road you're committed and can't go back).

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

#576

Post by rfrey »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #339
rfrey wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homes today are cheaper than the 60s? The 60s where a single earner family, where the earner was a schoolteacher, could afford a house before having kids?

The materials for the home are cheaper (adjusted for increase in quality/utility). For example, insulating a house to the same level is cheaper today than in previous decades. Same with the plumbing and flooring and many other advances where plastics technologies made a lot of things cheaper and safer too. Land in certain locations of course a different matter, as well as labor.

There's no way the run-up in housing prices is all land. In 1960 the average house price was 11,700... about 115,000 in 2022 dollars. I'm 51 and have built several houses. Since I was 22 and started being interested in real estate, the rule of thumb was 20% land, 80% house for the value of a new build. That means the average house in 1960 (no land) was probably about 98,000 to build in 2022 dollars.

The average house size in 1960 was 1200 sqft, so call that $82/sqft in 2022 dollars.

The US average cost to build a new house in 2021 was $124/sqft. Meanwhile, the construction workers building the house were getting paid on average $6933/yr ($67,700 in 2022 dollars) whereas a construction worker now averages $47,000/yr.

So the labor costs have gone down by 30%, but the price of the house has gone up by 51%.

The materials might be better or they might be worse, but they're sure not making houses cheaper.

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

#577

Post by Dylan16807 »

adwn wrote: post #571
Dylan16807 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something would have broken, or you'd have to fiddle with some settings I don't remember any trouble with screens or moving windows around or doing streaming video around that time. > Also, which single cable would you have used to carry video and audio, and which could be plugged into a laptop and a TV? Oh, I didn't realize you were suggesting the audio moved to the TV. Well HDMI came out a couple years later and…

> Well HDMI came out a couple years later and didn't really blow minds. Of course not. All of those improvements were, taken on their own, iterative and evolutionary – as nearly all technological development is. But taken together, they make a big difference.

Except I'm saying all those other things already worked fine. Your scenario is an incremental change between then and today. If you want that super impressive effect you need to compare against longer ago than 2002. If you do that in 1992, wow.

You could still do a 20 year comparison if you wanted, 1992 vs. 2012. Since the experience has barely changed in the last 10 years.

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

#578

Post by marcosdumay »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #540
marcosdumay wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)).

That graph on my comment is the rate of change of productivity (on a relative base, so it's not a derivative, a derivative would be a small bit biased lower). It's what you are calling PRODUCTIVITY_GROWTH. (I didn't find one with the raw productivity.)

You can see directly on the graph that it stays for some times dancing around 0. Most of the times it's higher, but the times with a near 0 average are quite long. If you "integrate" it over the exponentials, you will get some times of approximately linear growth, separated by times of almost no growth. Those times of almost no growth are what people normally talk about when they talk about productivity stagnation. One of those was at the 80s when the computers were taking over offices, another one is quite recent, after the 2008 crisis.

Anyway, the GDP per capita graph is very different.

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

#579

Post by kcexn »

From what I see, a lot more productivity can still be extracted from existing technology if only people would try to use it more.

Configuring software is regularly more complicated than it needs to be. And software developers are tied in to using the 'language of software' (visual and written language to describe widgets, disk space, bandwidth, latency, whatever) in their applications, leading to many users being unable to understand the capabilities of the tools they use.

Education of the next generation of kids to better understand software will tremendously help this. But so will, I think, design that pays more attention to sensible defaults when releasing software to market to solve specific problems, rather than leave it to users to configure things to their needs.

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

#580

Post by thehappypm »

seoaeu wrote: post #381
thehappypm wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starry actually has way better speeds

Source? (Are you sure you aren’t confusing Mbps and Gbps?)

I used Starry, they for some reason advertise speeds slower than what you get in practice.
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