It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
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AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
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Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#32[flagged]
I assume this is sarcasm?
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#33Bottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy. With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo v…
> a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet. Is it possible that this sort of problem will be fixed? Hypothetically, what would happen in a scenario where one of these apps can do in 1 hr the work that would take a developer a month, reliably? Or is your premise that will NEVER happen?
The same underlying magic that enables LLMs to be faster than a brute force SQL query on all the worlds data while producing "good enough" results appears to be the very thing that is creating hallucinations and finite context windows. ie there is no free lunch. It seems to be the theory in many in the field (ilya included?) that the obstacle might not be overcome without an LLM-level breakthrough in AI research, or maybe more likely, a breakthrough in hardware. Big tech until at least recently seems to have thought they can brute force it with energy (nuclear). But who's paying?
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#34I guess this is trend now because it's a contrarian / attention grabbing headline. See:
- "Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity..." https://fortune.com/2026/02/17/ai-productivity-paradox-ceo-s...
- “Over 80% of companies report no productivity gains from AI…” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
But fundamentally, large shifts like this are like steering a super tanker, the effects take time to percolate through economies as large and diversified as the US. This is the Solow paradox / productivity paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
> The term can refer to the more general disconnect between powerful computer technologies and weak productivity growthRe: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#35This article seems to have "basically zero" content.
Today you have to be blind to not see the change that is coming.
World has its own (massive) inertia, burocracy present in businesses accounting for a big part in it.
AI itself is moving fast but not at infinite speeds. We start to have good enough tooling but it's not yet available to everyone and it still hangs on too many hacks that will need to crystalize. People have a lot of mess to sort out in their projects to start taking full advantage of AI tooling - in general everybody has to do bottom up cleanup and documentation of all their projects, setup skills and whatnot and that's assuming their corp is ok with it, not blocking it and "using ai" doesn't mean that "you can copy paste code to/from copilot 365".
As people say - something changed around Dec/Jan. We're only now going to start seeing noticable changes and changes themselves will start speeding up as well. But it all takes time.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#36[flagged]
GitHub has never been down since Copilot was released.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#37It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
The difference being that AI's marketing has been significantly more prevalent than any early computing efforts.
Not to mention the investment is on another level. We've got companies with valuations in the hundred-billions talking about raising trillions to buy all of the computers in the world, before establishing whether they can even turn a profit, nevermind upend the economy.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#38It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
I am not saying this to be sarcastic - the problem is that people from OpenAI/Antrhopic are saying things like superintelligence in 3 years, or boris saying coding is solved and that 100% of his code is written by AI. It's not good enough to just say oreo ceos say we need to more oreos. There's a real grey area where these tools are useful in some capacity, and in that confusion we're spending billions. Too may peopl…
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Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#39It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
The difference being that AI's marketing has been significantly more prevalent than any early computing efforts.
This seems false to me. Commodore and Apple were blitzing every advertising medium and especially TV ads in the early 1980s.
Re: AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, and the same with the internet. During the 1990s and 2000s, people kept wondering why the internet wasn't showing up in productivity numbers. Many asked if the internet was therefore just a fad or bubble. Same as some now do with AI. It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
It didn't take mobile apps with the launch of the iPhone 20 years to add to the economy though, did it?
The iPhone was not the first mobile device or even the first smartphone. Not to mention it did not support mobile applications as we know them today.