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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

#241

Post by KellyCriterion »

dangus wrote: post #191
slopinthebag wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And really the problem isn’t that it can’t make working code, the problem is that it’ll never get the kind of context that is in your brain. 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 th…

>>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.This is your problem: How should it know if you do not provide it?

Use Claude - in the pro version you can submit files for each project which are setting the context: This can be files, source code, SQL scripts, screenshots whatever - then the output will be based on your context given by providing these files.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#242

Post by KellyCriterion »

Waterluvian wrote: post #150
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.

(pre) VisiCalc: You have to understand that the primary users (accountants etc.) do not care about how a thing looks in their working process: If a tool helps them, they will use it even if its ugly according to aesthetical frontend questions :-)

(Think about this old black/white or green mainframe screens - horrible looking but it gets their job done)

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#243

Post by beeflet »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #234
wiseowise wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

Your claim and the claims that all white collar jobs are going to disappear in 12-18 months cannot both be true. I guess we will see.

I think they can both be true. Perhaps the innovation of AI is not that it automates important work, but because it forces people to question if the work has already been automated or is even necessary.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#244

Post by itake »

aurareturn wrote: post #232
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #218

My experience has been * If I don't know how to do something, llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research something to a small amount. * if I know something well, I find myself trying to guide the llm to make the best decisions. I haven't reached the state of completely letting go and trusting the llm yet, because the llm doesn't make good long term decisions * when working a…

The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants. I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each Same number of engineers. We are about to enter an era of explosiv…

yeah, I agree.

When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#245

Post by bazmattaz »

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)

My manager mentioned that his manager (an executive) is not happy because the org we are in are not using as much tokens as other orgs in the company. Pretty wild

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#246

Post by entrox »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #166
amrocha wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You could have easily made the same point and just not included the last sentence. Guidelines an all that

I feel different: the last line is very important in this context, since it communicates the underlying thoughts and values of the poster.

Asking for "amazing" open source projects in this case is not asking out of genuine curiosity or want for debate, it is a rhetorical question asked out of frustration at the general trajectory of AI and who profits off of it -- namely the boot-wearers.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#247

Post by tehjoker »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #185
bubblewand wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought…

> And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit. It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this. > advertising I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can s…

It's an important function in a capitalist economy. Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life". That said, some advertising can be useful to inform consumers that a good exists, but convincing them they need it by synthesizing desires or fighting off competitors? Useless and socially detrimental.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#248

Post by tonyedgecombe »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #92
46493168 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think there are enough short term supposed benefits that something should be showing there. As measured by whom? The same managers who demanded we all return to the office 5 days a week because the only way they can measure productivity is butts in seats?

Productivity is the ratio of outputs to inputs, both measured in dollars.

Productivity is the ratio of real GDP to total hours worked.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#249

Post by aurareturn »

itake wrote: post #244
aurareturn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants. I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each Same number of engineers. We are about to enter an era of explosiv…

yeah, I agree. When Engineering Budget Managers see their AI bills rising, they will fire the bottom 5-10% every 6-12 months and increase the AI assistant budget for the high performers, giving them even more leverage.

In my case, over the last 3 years, every dev who left was not replaced. We are doing more than ever.

Our team shrunk by 50% but we are serving 200% more customers. Every time a dev left, we thought we're screwed. We just leveraged AI more and more. We are also serving our customers better too with higher retention rates. When we onboard a customer with custom demands, we used to have meetings about the ROI. Now we just build the custom demands in the time we took to meet to discuss whether we should even do it.

Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. The original developers left the company. All I know is what is suppose to go into the service and what is suppose to come out. When there is a bug, I ask the AI why. The AI almost always finds it. When I need to change something, I double and triple check the logic and I know how to test the changes.

No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. That's why I still have a job. But how I spend my time as a software engineer has changed drastically and so has my productivity.

When a software dev say AI doesn't increase their productivity, it truly does feel like they're using it wrong or don't know how to use it.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#250

Post by majormajor »

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…

Coding is a relatively verifiable and strict task: it has to pass the compiler, it has to pass the test suite, it has to meet the user's requests.

There are a lot of white-collar tasks that have far lower quality and correctness bars. "Researching" by plugging things into google. Writing reports summarizing how a trend that an exec saw a report on can be applied to the company. Generating new values to share at a company all-hands.

Tons of these that never touch the "real world." Your assistant story is like a coding task - maybe someone ran some tests, maybe they didn't, but it was verifiable. No shortage of "the tests passed, but they weren't the right test, this broke some customers and had to be fixed by hand" coding stories out there like it. There are pages and pages of unverifiable bullshit that people are sleepwalking through, too, though.

Nobody already knows if those things helped or hurt, so nobody will ever even notice a hallucination.

But everyone in all those fields is going to be trying really really hard to enumerate all the reasons it's special and AI won't work well for them. The "management says do more, workers figure out ways to be lazier" see-saw is ancient, but this could skew far towards "management demands more from fewer people" spectrum for a while.

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