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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
171–180 of 783 posts
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? I'd suspect the kind that's going away.
That kind was already reserved for junior roles, contractors, and off shoring.
I’m not sure everyone would agree with that statement. As a more senior engineer at a big tech company, our execs still believe more code output is expected by level. Hell they even measure and rate you on lines of code deltas.
I don’t agree with it or believe it’s smart but it’s the world we live in
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
> but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book. That book was very different than what I expected from all of the internet comment takes about it. The premise was really thin and did't actually support the idea that the jobs don't generate value. It was comparing to a hypothetical world where everything is perfectly organized, everyon…
Hmmm, I got something different. I thought that Bullshit Jobs was based on people who self reported that their jobs were pointless. He detailed these types of jobs, the negative psychological impact this can have on employees, and the kicker was that these jobs don't make sense economically, the bureaucratization of the health care and education sectors for example, in contrast so many other professions that actually are useful. Other examples were status-symbol employees, sycophants, duct-tapers, etc.
I thought he made a case for both societal and economic impact.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% All of the people who are floored by AI capabilities right now are software engineers, and everyone who's extremely skeptical basically has any other office job. On investigating their primary AI interaction surface, it's Microsoft Co-Pilot, which has to be the absolute shittiest implementation of any AI system so far. As a progress-driven person, it's just super disappointing to see how few people are benefitin…
I think anthropic will succeed immensely here because when integrated with Microsoft365 and especially Excel it basically does what co-pilot said it would do. The moment of realisation happen for a lot of normoid business people when they see claude make a DCF spreadsheet or search emails claude is also smart because it visually shows the user as it resizes the columns, changes colours, etc. Seeing the computer do th…
Hilarious lack of self awareness. Calling others "normoids" yet you believe you can emphasise with them enough to predict how they will adopt AI?
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#175Earlier 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…
What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#176These 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.
> Ask the forward thinking companies and they’ll say the opposite.
Which ones? OpenAI? Microsoft? Anthropic?
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely. Not recognizing the essential role of sales seemed to be a common mistake.
What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought…
How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#178Just 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…
I've never looked at enterprise licensing, but regular license wise, a Claude subscription is actually $200 a month. I don't count the $20 or $100 tiers because they're too limited to be useful (especially professionally!)
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#179Earlier 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…
What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
I think this is extremely common and nobody wants to admit to it!
Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
#180Earlier 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…
Agreed. We do have a way to see the financial impact - just add up Anthropic and oAI's reported revenues -> something like $30b in annual run rate. Given growth rates, (stratospheric), it seems reasonable to conclude informed buyers see economic and/or strategic benefit in excess of their spend. I certainly do! That puts the benefits to the economy at just around where Mastercard's benefits are, on a dollar basis. Bu…
Investors are optimistic, but what will this new tech be used for? Advertising? Propaganda? Surveillance? Drone strikes?
Does profitable always equal useful? Might other cultures justifiably think differently, like the Amish?