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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

#141

Post by al_borland »

Herring wrote: post #9

My compsci brain suggests large orgs are a distributed system running on faulty hardware (humans) with high network latency (communication). The individual people (CPUs) are plenty fast, we just waste time in meetings, or waiting for approval, or a lot of tasks can't be parallelized, etc. Before upgrading, you need to know if you're I/O Bound vs CPU Bound.

When my company first started pushing for devs to use AI, the most senior guy on my team was pretty vocal about coding not being the bottleneck that slowed down work. It was an I/O issue, and maybe a caching issue as well from too many projects going at the same time with no focus… which also makes the I/O issues worse.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#142

Post by gsf_emergency_6 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #79
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…

For more on this exact topic and an answer to Solow’s Paradox, see, the excellent, The Dynamo and the Computer by Paul David [0]. [0]: https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...

Stanford prof rebutts David's idea[0] that it's difficult to extract productivity from the data

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25148/w251...

I don't agree that real GDP measures what he thinks it measures, but he opines

>Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 403,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7 per cent growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling — maintaining high output with significantly lower labour input — is the hallmark of productivity growth.

https://www.ft.com/content/4b51d0b4-bbfe-4f05-b50a-1d485d419...

[0] on the basis that IT and AI are not general technologies in the mold of the dynamo, keyword "intangibles", see section 4 p21, A method to measure intangibles

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#143

Post by whynotminot »

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 also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it.

On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code.

The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon.

You can’t expect revolutionary impact while people are still learning how to even use the thing. We’re so early.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#144

Post by beart »

jdlshore wrote: post #77
simonw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep moving those goal posts.

Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.) You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated. GP countered (somewhat…

It has been argued for a very long time, lines of code is largely meaningless as a metric. But now that AI is writing those lines... it seems to be meaningful again? I continue to be optimistically skeptical.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#145

Post by famouswaffles »

jdlshore wrote: post #77
simonw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep moving those goal posts.

Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.) You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated. GP countered (somewhat…

It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'?

4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'.

The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it works and that's that.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#146

Post by ericfr11 »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #138
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 wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990's that information technology finally started to show clear benefit to the economy overall. The 1990s boom was in large part due to connectivity -- millions[1] of computers joined the Internet . [1] _ In the 1990s. Today, there are billions of devices connected, most of them Android devices.

Android in the 90s Not really

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#147

Post by HWR_14 »

mr_toad wrote: post #38
bubblewand wrote: post #7

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?

Management probably also wants them to figure out how to use the laptops, ide and other resources provided to them. Getting a tool for your employees that you've been told is important but have no idea what to do with is a perfectly valid management task.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#148

Post by sebmellen »

conductr wrote: post #56
throwawaysleep wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

I have a dystopian future vision where humans are cheaper machines than robots, so we become the disposable task force for grunt work that robots aren’t cheap enough for. To some degree this is already happening.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#149

Post by politelemon »

whynotminot wrote: post #143
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 also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

You are assuming that we all work on the same tasks and should have exactly the same experience with it, which is it course far from the truth. It's probably best to start with that base assumption and work on the implications from there.

As for the last example, for all the money being spent on this area, if someone is expected to perform a workflow based on the kind of question they're supposed to ask, that's a failure in the packaging and discoverability aspect of the product, the leaky abstraction only helps some of us who know why it's there.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#150

Post by Waterluvian »

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…

Wow I didn’t realize that. But I always thought it. I was bewildered that anyone got any real value out of any of that pre-VisiCalc (or even VisiCalc) computer tech for business. It all looked kinda clumsy.
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