AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

I started working today on a project I hadn’t touched in a while but I now needed to as it was involved in an incident where I needed to address some shortcomings. I knew the fix I needed to do but I went about my usual AI assisted workflow because of course I’m lazy the last thing I want to do is interrupt my normal work to fix this stupid problem.

The AI doesn’t know anything about the full scope of all the things in my head about my company’s environment and the information I need to convey to it. I can give it a lot of instructions but it’s impossible to write out everything in my head across multiple systems.

The AI did write working code, but despite writing the code way faster than me, it made small but critical mistakes that I wouldn’t have made on my first draft.

For example, it just added in a command flag that I knew that it didn’t need, and it actually probably should have known it, too. Basically it changed a line of code that it didn’t need to touch.

It also didn’t realize that the curled URL was going to redirect so we needed an -L flag. Maybe it should have but my brain knew it already.

It also misinterpreted some changes in direction that a human never would have. It confused my local repository for the remote one because I originally thought I was going to set a mirror, but I changed plans and used a manual package upload to curl from. So it out the remote URL in some places where the local one should have been.

Finally, it seems to have just created some strange text gore while editing the readme where it deleted existing content for seemingly no reason other than some kind of readline snafu.

So yes it produced very fast great code that would have taken me way longer to do, but I had to go back and consume a very similar amount of time to fix so many things that I might as well have just done it manually.

But hey I’m glad my company is paying $XX/month for my lazy workday machine.

Like when a competing country builds their tenth battleship, so you commission another one to match them. The world would have been better if neither had been build. Money changed hands (one supposes) but the aim of the whole exercise had no effect. It was similar to paying people to dig holes a fill them back in again, to the tune of serious money. This was so utterly stupid and wasteful that there was a whole treaty about it, to try to prevent so many bullshit jobs from being created again.

Or when Pepsi increases their ad spending in Brazil, so Coca Cola counters, and much of the money ends up accomplishing little except keeping things just how they were. That component or quality of the ad industry, the book claims, is bullshit, on account of not doing any good.

The book treats of several ways in which a job might be bullshit, and just kinda mentions this one as an aside: the zero-sum activity. It mostly covers other sorts, but this is the closest I can recall it coming to declaring sales “bullshit” (the book rarely, bordering on never, paints even most of an entire industry or field as bullshit, and advertising isn’t sales, but it’s as close as it got, as I recall)

Seems like a pretty dumb take. It’s like saying it only takes $X in electricity and raw materials to produce a widget that I sell for $Y. Since $Y is bigger than $X, I’m making money! Just ignore that I have to pay people to work the lines. Ignore that I had to pay huge amounts to build the factory. Ignore every other cost.

They can’t just fire everyone and stop training new models.

Compare those to the pigments used (mixed up!) by professional painters, and then to what printers could make.

If you wanted to paint fine art in the 1400s you were possibly making your own canvases, your own paint brushes, and your own paints.

And on top of that you had to be a skilled painter!

> 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 American revolution included a lot of propaganda courtesy of printing presses and some very rich financers who had a vested interest in a revolution occuring.

Pamphlets everywhere. It is one thing to scribble on a wall, it is another to produce messages at a mass scale.

That sense of scale has been multiplied yet again by AI.