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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

fortune.com

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#101

Post by boxedemp »

cmiles8 wrote: post #28

I like AI and use it daily, but this bubble can’t pop soon enough so we can all return to normally scheduled programming. CEOs are now on the downside of the hype curve. They went from “Get me some of that AI!” after first hearing about it, to “Why are we not seeing any savings? Shut this boondoggle down!” now that we’re a few years into bubble, the business math isn’t working, and they only see burning piles of cash…

I consume a lot of different content on a lot of different places. Every site or app has its vibe and communal beliefs. They rarely if ever agree on anything, but they all agree we're in a massive bubble.

I don't have a point, just that it's an unlikely unity.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#102

Post by jama211 »

abraxas wrote: post #64
torben-friis wrote: post #42

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…

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 it’s more likely that the same amount of work is getting done, just it’s far less taxing. And that averages are funny things, for developers it’s undeniably a huge boost, but for others it’s creating friction.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#103

Post by HWR_14 »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #66
crazygringo wrote: post #21

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…

> it's helping lots of people, but it's also costing an extraordinary amount of money Is it fair to say that wall street is betting America's collective pensions on AI...

Very few people have pensions anymore. People now direct their own retirement funds.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#104

Post by tverbeure »

simonw wrote: post #61
gruez wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am confident that Anthropic make revenue from that $20 than the electricity and server costs needed to serve that customer. Claude Code has rate limits for a reason: I expect they are carefully designed to ensure that the average user doesn't end up losing Anthropic money, and that even extreme heavy users don't cause big enough losses for it to be a problem. Everything I've heard makes me believe the margins on in…

Nobody questions that Anthropic makes revenue from a $20 subscription. The opposite would be very strange.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#105

Post by LPisGood »

danans wrote: post #96
LPisGood wrote: post #31

Earlier 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? 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…

> 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.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#106

Post by com2kid »

amrocha wrote: post #73
afavour wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone asked “where are all the small businesses”, this was a reply to that. Small businesses don’t have entire art departments.

Gotcha, so the impact of AI is small businesses get to save a couple hundred dollars and the cost is only 2% of your countries GDP. That’s good.

Prior to industrialization if you wanted to paint something you had to know how to mix your own paints.

And make your own brushes.

Before the printing presses came along, putting up flyers was not even imaginable.

Signs for businesses used to hand carved.

Then printed. A store sign was still produced by a team of professionals, but small businesses coils reasonably afford to print a sign. Not often updated, but it existed.

Then desktop publishing took off. Now lone graphic designers could design and send work off to a print shop. Small businesses could now afford regularly updated menus, signage, and even adverts and flyers.

Now small businesses can make their own creatives. AI can change stylesheets, write ad copy, and generate promotional photos.

Does any of this have the artistry of hand carved signs from 600 years ago? Of course not.

But the point is technology gives individuals control.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#107

Post by jama211 »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #91
sebmellen wrote: post #12

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…

Thinking is always the hardest part and the bottleneck for me. It doesn’t capture everyone’s experience when you say thinking is the smaller part of programming. I don’t even believe a regular person is capable of producing good quality code without thinking 2x the amount they are coding

Most people (and most businesses) aren’t making good quality code though. Most tools we use have horrible codebases. Therefore now the code can often be a similar quality to before, just done far faster.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#108

Post by boxedemp »

deadbabe wrote: post #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.

Software doesn't need to be good to be successful; it only needs to solve a problem and be better than the competition.

I predict a golden age for experienced developers! There will be an uncountable number of poorly designed apps with scaling issues. And many of them will be funded.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#109

Post by azuanrb »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
crazygringo wrote: post #21

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…

$20 is not useable, need $100 plan at least for development purposes. That is a lot of money for some countries. In my country, that can be 1/10 of their monthly salary. Hard to get approval on it. It is still too expensive right now.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#110

Post by AstroBen »

amrocha wrote: post #73
afavour wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone asked “where are all the small businesses”, this was a reply to that. Small businesses don’t have entire art departments.

Gotcha, so the impact of AI is small businesses get to save a couple hundred dollars and the cost is only 2% of your countries GDP. That’s good.

Couple hundred dollars

..a month

..multiplied by how many small businesses globally?

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