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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

#331

Post by y42 »

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…

Problem is, that just having a Claude subscription doesn't make you productive. Most of those talks happen in a "tech'ish" environments. Not every business is about coding.

Real life example: A client came to me asking how to compare orders against order confirmation from the vendor. They come as PDF files. Which made me wonder: Wait, you don't have any kind of API or at least structured data that the vendor gives you?

Nope.

And here you are. I am not talking about a niche business. I assume that's a broader problem. Tech can probably automate everything and this since 30 years. Still business lack of "proper" IT processes, because at the end every company is unique and requires particular measures to be "fully" onboarded to IT based improvements like that.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#332

Post by Havoc »

I find this difficult to reconcile with things like for example freelance translation being basically wiped out wholesale

Or even the simple utility of having a chatbot. They’re not popular because they’re useless

Which to me says it’s more likely that people under estimate corporate inertia

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#333

Post by wolvesechoes »

Wilder7977 wrote: post #272
tehjoker wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty.

Yeah, guy states that in multiple places, and yet here we are, with an impression that most people referencing the book apparently didn't read it.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#334

Post by wolvesechoes »

emp17344 wrote: post #90
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.

The thesis of Bullshit Jobs is almost universally rejected by economists, FYI. There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.

Not surprising, because thesis is not about economy.

> There’s not much of value to obtain from the book.

Anthropological insight has much more value than anything economists may produce on economy.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#335

Post by tsukurimashou »

Banditoz wrote: post #24
jeron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it turns out it's really hard to get a man to fish with a pole when you don't teach them how to use the reel

If AGI is coming, won't there just be autofishers and no one will ever have to fish again, completely devaluing one's fishing knowledge and the effort put in to learn it?

> If AGI is coming

spoiler, it's not

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#336

Post by koiueo »

al_borland wrote: post #141
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.

So how is it going for him? Was he able to prove his point?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#337

Post by fakedang »

sanex wrote: post #163
hattmall wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That makes it a perfect use case for AI, since now you don't need a dev for that. Any devs doing that would, imo, be effectively performing one of David Graeber's bullshit jobs.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#338

Post by mark_l_watson »

I think the best point made in this conversation is that AI is often enough used to do things quickly that have little value, or just waste people’s time.

I am glad to see articles like this that evaluate impact, but I wish the following would get more public interest:

With LLMs we are chasing sort-of linear growth in capability at exponential cost increases for power and compute.

Were you mad when the government bailed out mis-managed banks? The mother of all government bailouts might be using the US taxpayer to fund idiot companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are spending $1000 in costs to earn $100.

I am starting to feel like the entire industry is lazy: we need fundamental new research in energy and compute efficient AI. I do love seeing non-LLM research efforts and more being done with much smaller task-focused models, but the overall approach we are taking in the USA is f$cking crazy. I fear we are going to lose big-time on this one.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#339

Post by ch4s3 »

matwood wrote: post #291
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…

> smaller companies And large companies. The first half of my career was spent writing internal software for large companies. I believe it's still the case that the majority of software written is for internal software. AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software for its exact use case(s).

> AI will be a boon for these use cases as it will make it easier for every company big and small to have custom software

Big cos often have the problem of defining the internal problems they’re trying to solve. Once identified they have to create organizational permission structures to allow the solutions. Then they need to stay on tasks long enough to build and use the software to solve the problem.

Only one of these steps is easily improved with AI.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#340

Post by arisAlexis »

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…

Only it's much more exponential
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