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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

fortune.com

51–60 of 783 posts

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#51

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#52
post #40
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then where are all the amazing open source programs written by individuals by themselves? Where are all the small businesses supposedly assisted by AI?

Seemingly every day on Show HN? Also small businesses aren't going to publish blog posts saying "we saved $500 on graphic design this week!"

Is saving 500$ by generating some shitty AI art the bar? I thought this supposed to replace entire departments

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#53
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

How viable are the $20/month subscriptions for actual work and are they loss making for Anthropic? I've heard both of people needing to get higher tiers to get anything done in Claude Code and also that the subscriptions are (heavily?) subsidized by Anthropic, so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good.

id guess the 200 subscription sufficient per person.

but at that point you could go for a bugger one and split amongst headcount

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#54

The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar busines…

I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were alre…

Well that’s why AI will not replace the software engineer!

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#55

The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar busines…

> unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion.

huh? maybe im in the minority, but the thinking:coding has always been 80:20 spend a ton of time thinking and drawing, then write once and debug a bit, and it works

this hasnt really changed with Llm coding either, except that for the same amount of thinking, you get more code output

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#56

These surveys don’t make sense. Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite. The flood of anti AI productivity articles almost feel like they’re meant to lull the population into not seeing what’s about to happen to employment.

Eh, try using Microsoft Copilot in Word or PowerPoint. It is worthless. If your experience with AI was a Microsoft product, you would think it was a scam too.

It’s not just that though. You find when going through AI projects in an organization that many times the process is manual for a reason. This isn’t the first wave of “automation” that’s came through. Most things that can be fully automated already have been long ago and they manual parts get sold as we can make AI do it, until you see the specs and noodle around on the problem some then you realize it’s probably just going to remain manual as the amount of model training requires as much time and effort as just doing it by hand.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#57
post #38

My company’s behind the curve, just got nudged today that I should make sure my AI use numbers aren’t low enough to stand out or I may have a bad time. Reckon we’re minimum six months from “oh whoops that was a waste of money”, maybe even a year. (Unless the AI market very publicly crashes first)

So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI? Do they also make you write your own performance review and set your own objectives?

> So management basically have no clue and want you to figure out how to use AI?

This is basically the same story I have heard both my own place of employment and also from a number of friends. There is a "need" for AI usage, even if the value proposition is undefined (or, as I would expect, non-existent) for most businesses.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#58

The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. Writing the software, which is essentially working through how to implement the thought, used to take a much larger percentage of the overall time consumed from thought to completion. Other white collar busines…

I’m confused what kind of software engineer jobs there are that don’t involve meeting with people, “aligning expectations”, getting consensus, making slides/decks to communicate that, thinking about market positioning, etc? If you weren’t doing much of that before, I struggled to think of how you were doing much engineering at all, save some more niche extremely technical roles where many of those questions were alre…

Ime a team or project lead does that and the rest of the engineers maybe do that on a smaller scale but mostly implement.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#59

Just to be clear, the article is NOT criticizing this. To the contrary, it's presenting it as expected , thanks to Solow's productivity paradox [1]. Which is that information technology similarly (and seemingly shockingly) didn't produce any net economic gains in the 1970's or 1980's despite all the computerization. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benef…

The comparison seems flawed in terms of cost. A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker if using personal accounts billed to the company, which is not very far from common office tools like slack. Onboarding a worker to Claude or ChatGPT is ridiculously easy compared to teaching a 1970’s manual office worker to use an early computer. Larger implementations like automating customer service might be more costly, but…

Like Uber/Airbnb in early days, this is heavily subsidized.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#60
The people who will be most productive with AI will be the entreprompteurs who whip up entire products and go to market faster than ever before, iterating at dangerous speeds. Lean Startup methodology on pure steroids basically.

Unfortunately I think most of the stuff they make will be shit, but they will build it very productively.

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