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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#761

Post by aurareturn »

Wilder7977 wrote: post #748
aurareturn wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to a time at the start of Youtube. Now answer these questions: And what will those people who make videos on Youtube do? Produce videos in uber-saturated categories? Or magically 9900 more media channels will be created, all of them successful?

YouTube is a platform, it's not a product. And in this case, created a new market. A market in which, by the way, still very few people (relative to those who try) are successful. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage would be much smaller than 10%. A quick search leads to different answer, but https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon... suggests that 0.25% of all YouTube channels make…

0.25% is 77,500 thousand channels by the way.

Now count how many TV stations there were in the 90s and 2000s.

This is just Youtube alone. What about streamers on Twitch? Youtube? Tiktokers? IG influencers?

Plenty of people are making money creating video content online.

The internet, ease and advancements in video editing tools, and cheap portable cameras all came together to allow millions of content creators instead of 100 TV channels.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#762

Post by generic92034 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #649
generic92034 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So yes - in a reasonably functioning capitalist market (which the U.S still is in my eyes) I expect gross inefficiencies to not be prevalent. I am not sure that is true, though. Assume for a moment that Google would waste 50% of their profits. Truly, a huge inefficiency. However, would that make it likely some other corp could take their search/ad market share from them? I doubt it, given the abyss of a moat.

True. Therefore, what? One could say: True, therefore search is not a reasonably functioning capitalist market. Yeah, I know, this can turn into "no true capitalist market". Still, it seems reasonable to say that many markets work in a certain kind of way (with lots of competition), and search is not one of those markets.

The parent was referring to the whole US as "market". In that sense the numerous exceptions and non-functioning markets invalidate the statement, IMHO.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#763

Post by anukin »

vidarh wrote: post #286
overgard wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "results don't match promises" is the same as "not knowing how to use it". I've been using Claude and OpenAI's latest models for the past two weeks now (probably moving at about 1000 lines of code a day, which is what I can comfortably review), and it makes subtle hard-to-find mistakes all over the place. Or it just misunderstands well known design patterns, or does something bone headed. I'm fine with…

Do you use an agent harness to have it review code for you before you do? If not, you don't know how to use it efficiently . A large part of using AI efficiently is to significantly lower that review burden by having it do far more of the verification and cleanup itself before you even look at it.

What sort of agent harness setup do you recommend?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#764

Post by KellyCriterion »

Guillaume86 wrote: post #656
KellyCriterion wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A neighbour of me has a PhD and is working in research at a hospital. He is super smart. Last time he said: "yes yes I know about ChatGPT, but I do not use it at work or home." Therefore, most people wont even know about Gemini, Grok or even Claude.

He said he know about it and your conclusion is that he doesnt know about the other ones...

No, my conclusion is that if even smart people do not elaborate on any usage of AI (regardless which brand they put) is a clear sign that we are not talking about "mass adoption"

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#765

Post by Wilder7977 »

aurareturn wrote: post #756
Wilder7977 wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon... Claims 0.25% of channels makes any money at all. The amount that make a decent living is realistically even smaller, possibly To me the YouTube example seems to be the exact demonstration that markets saturate and market distribution is still a winner-takes-all kind of deal.

0.25% of channels, how many of them even want to make money? 0.25% of how many? Average size of YouTube channel team that makes money vs TV channel team in the 2000s?

There are no such detailed numbers as far as I know. No platform (twitch, YouTube etc.) generally provides this information. Thinking bad one could assume it's because most people would realize it's one in a million who makes it.

Channels that make money consistently also have teams behind. Sure, probably they are smaller then TV studios, but TV studios do also other jobs compared to youtubers.

Anyway, these are the only numbers available. If there are numbers that show that masses of individuals can make a living in a market with so many competitors like YouTube I am happy to look at them. Until then, I will observe what is known for almost everything: a small % takes the vast majority of resources.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#766

Post by wao0uuno »

watwut wrote: post #660
wao0uuno wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he meant was that the top 1% ruling class is keeping those bullshit jobs around to keep the poor people (their cattle) occupied so they won't have time and energy to think and revolt.

It is bullshit argunent. The 1% is seeking to fire as many people as possible and with pleasure. We dont matter to them, one was or the other. They dont see us as a threat, just as bugs.

If push comes to shove hopefully those bugs will remember how to bite.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#767

Post by overgard »

sebmellen wrote: post #719
overgard wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Struggling with language feature memorization" is what we call "unemployed", not "relatively unproductive".

No. You can be a very productive developer and have the syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and the same in reverse. I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes, etc. white struggling massively with system design. And vice versa. People have different talents. But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success of the develo…

I find it highly suspect that someone can be a productive developer and find syntax to be a blocker. I've worked professionally in software for 20 years and I've yet to come across a developer I thought was good but kept forgetting what curly braces mean. It's like saying "he's a great writer, but he's illiterate."

I have, incidentally, held the title of "Principal Software Architect", designing distributed systems with kubernetes, and I will say this about architects: if they aren't immersed in the day to day code, they suck at their job. If you're too removed from the constraints you can't be effective at that job. I have however worked with "architects" that refused to get their hands dirty, and it was always miserable.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#768

Post by overgard »

sebmellen wrote: post #718
overgard wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing words-per-minute on their resu…

> I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks. OK, to quote you: WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP! You've made a lot of assumptions. I'm not saying that coding is not thinking. What I'm saying is this: There is a difference between: (a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and…

I don't like this perspective because you're reducing developers to "mere implementers". That's not something I see in healthy work environments. A lot of times developers have to make business decisions, because they're the first person to encounter holes in the spec and no project manager is going to define things completely.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#769

Post by sebmellen »

overgard wrote: post #767
sebmellen wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You can be a very productive developer and have the syntax be more of a blocker than application design, and the same in reverse. I interview a lot of people, and I've seen people who are astoundingly good at micro-systems, very complex regexes, etc. white struggling massively with system design. And vice versa. People have different talents. But, in my experience, AI will vastly improve the success of the develo…

I find it highly suspect that someone can be a productive developer and find syntax to be a blocker. I've worked professionally in software for 20 years and I've yet to come across a developer I thought was good but kept forgetting what curly braces mean. It's like saying "he's a great writer, but he's illiterate." I have, incidentally, held the title of "Principal Software Architect", designing distributed systems w…

OK, I think "syntax" might mean different things to different people.

I'll give you an example: at one time I essentially re-implemented the behavior of a WeakMap in JS because I didn't know that the language feature existed. AI is much better at implicitly "knowing" these things because it can model the entire language and possible token-space much better than humans can. That is something I always struggled with; my long-term memory is not great.

I think that's very different from remembering how to write a basic function.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#770

Post by sebmellen »

overgard wrote: post #768
sebmellen wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm absolutely baffled that you think the job that requires some of the most thinking, by far, is somehow less cognitively intense than sending emails and making slide decks. OK, to quote you: WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP! You've made a lot of assumptions. I'm not saying that coding is not thinking. What I'm saying is this: There is a difference between: (a) thinking about, and deciding upon, what will be done, and…

I don't like this perspective because you're reducing developers to "mere implementers". That's not something I see in healthy work environments. A lot of times developers have to make business decisions, because they're the first person to encounter holes in the spec and no project manager is going to define things completely.

I'm sorry you interpreted it that way. I certainly don't think developers are mere implementers, and certainly no one on my team is. I expect a lot of ownership and independent execution from people I work with.

I also don't expect AI to replace software engineers any more than white-collar business people.

But what I'm saying is the work of "mere implementation" is now happening pretty quickly with AI tooling.

Most white-collar work is not "mere implementation" but rather the yak shaving and spec definition that precedes "mere implementation" — and this includes software development. For that reason, it will be harder to fully automate.

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