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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

#161

Post by tstrimple »

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…

> On hacker news, a very tech literate place

I think this is the prior you should investigate. That may be what HN used to be. But it's been a long time since it has been an active reality. You can still see actual expert opinions on HN, but they are the minority more and more.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#162

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Aurornis wrote: post #132
abraxas wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#163

Post by sanex »

hattmall wrote: post #93
abraxas wrote: post #64

Earlier 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.

I find that highly unlikely, coding is the AIs best value use case by far. Right now office workers see marginal benefits but it's not like it's an order of magnitude difference. AI drafts an email, you have to check and edit it, then send it. In many cases it's a toss up if that actually saved time, and then if it did, it's not like the pace of work is break neck anyway, so the benefit is some office workers have a…

Not all code generates economic value. See slacks, jiras, etc constant ui updates.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#164

Post by habinero »

com2kid wrote: post #106
amrocha wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

None of this is even slightly correct lol

People have been painting with red and yellow ochre and soot for at least 50K years for sure, and probably several hundred thousand years in truth. You don't need a brush, you have fingers or a twig.

The walls on the streets of Pompeii are full of advertising -- they had an election going on and people just scribbled slogans and such on walls. You don't need flyers lol.

The idea that signs or advertising was "artistry" is deeply ahistorical. The reason old stuff looks real fancy is because labor was extremely cheap and materials were expensive.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#165

Post by mrtksn »

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…

In a WhatsApp group full of doctors, managers, journalist and engineers (including software) in age of 30-60 I asked if anyone heard of openclaw and only 3 people heard of it from influencers, none used it.

But from my social feed the impression was that it is taking over the world:)

I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me but as it appears there’s no real adoption yet. Maybe there will be some once they release it as part of ChatGPT but even then it looks like too early as actually few people are using the more advanced tools.

It’s definitely in very early stage. It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#167

Post by Aurornis »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #162
Aurornis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.

Honestly this is how every critique of Graeber goes in my experience: As soon as his works are discussed beyond surface level, the goalposts start zooming around so fast that nothing productive can be discussed.

I tried to respond to the specific conversation about Bullshit Jobs above. In my experience, the way this book is brought up so frequently in online conversations is used as a prop for whatever the commenter wants it to mean, not what the book actually says.

I think Graeber did a fantastic job of picking "bullshit jobs" as a topic because it sounds like something that everyone implicitly understands, but how it's used in conversation and how Graeber actually wrote about the topic are basically two different things

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#168

Post by overgard »

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 coding tools are not hard to pick up. Agent chat and autocomplete in IDE's are braindead simple, and even TUI's like Claude are extremely easy to pickup (I think it took me a day?) And despite what the vibers like to pretend, learning to prompt them isn't that hard either. Or, let me clarify, if you know how to code, and you know how you want something coded, prompting them isn't that hard. I can't imagine it'll take that long for an impact to be seen, if there is a major impact to be seen.

I think it's more likely that people "feel" more productive, and/or we're measuring bad things (lines of code is an awful way to measure productivity -- especially considering that these agents duplicate code all the time so bloat is a given unless you actively work to recombine things and create new abstractions)

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#169

Post by slopinthebag »

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…

> I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code.

Really? Can you show any examples of someone claiming AI models cannot generate working code? I haven't seen anyone make that claim in years, even from the most skeptical critics.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#170

Post by overgard »

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…

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 this! But that's because I'm asking it to write code that I could write myself, and I'm actually reading it. This whole "it can build a whole company for me and I don't even look at it!" is overhype.
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