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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

#351

Post by whaleidk »

Kiro wrote: post #298
overgard wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing with a lot of white collar work is that the thinking/talking is often the majority of the work… unlike coding, where thinking is (or, used to be, pre-agent) a smaller percentage of the time consumed. WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH WHOAH STOP. No coder I've ever met has thought that thinking was anything other than the BIGGEST allocation of time when coding. Nobody is putting their typing words-per-minute on their resu…

Our job is not the intellectual exercise you think it is. We're not smarter than anyone else and software development is not automatically more thought-intensive than other jobs. The fact that programming is the first job task to be fully automated says it all.

It’s weird that you equate time spent thinking with intelligence and egotism. Plenty of “normal people” jobs require lots of time spent thinking like art, writing, product and ad design. The only one implying taking time to think equals big brain master race is you

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#353

Post by mark_l_watson »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #304
vjk800 wrote: post #296

My experience has been that AI is much more useful on my own systems than on company systems. For AI to (currently) be useful, I need to choose my own tooling and LLM models to support AI centered workflow. At work, I have to use whatever (usually Microsoft) tools my company has chosen to purchase and approve for my corporate computer, and usually nothing works as well as on my own machine where I get to set it up as…

What you are describing is a failure to integrate AI into said company systems. I have seen quite a few companies now that buy MS AI products with great hopes only to be severely disappointed, because they may as well have just used vanilla ChatGPT (in fact then they would at least get newer models faster). But there are counter examples too. If you can pull all your company documentation into a vector db and build a…

I have been using vector based RAG for about two years now, I am not knocking the tech, but last year I started experimenting with going way back in time and also in parallel trying BM25 search (or hybrid BM25 and vector). So: not even a very good example use case of LLMs, the tech is not always applicable.

EDIT: I am on a mobile device and don’t have a reference handy but there have been good papers on RAG scaling issues - basically the embedding space gets saturated (too many document chunks cluster in small areas of the embedding space), if my memory is correct.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#354

Post by dgoldstein0 »

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).

And thenb potentially suffer from integration hell.

The benefit of using off the shelf software is that many of the integration problems get solved by other people. Heck you may not even know you have a problem and they may already have a solution.

Custom software on the other hand could just breed more demand for custom software. We gotta be careful how much custom stuff we do lest it get completely out of hand

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#355

Post by iwontberude »

azuanrb wrote: post #109
torben-friis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

$20 is not useable, need $100 plan at least for development purposes. That is a lot of money for some countries. In my country, that can be 1/10 of their monthly salary. Hard to get approval on it. It is still too expensive right now.

Yeah it’s not obvious at first but a big project will cause usage to skyrocket bc of how much context it will stuff with reading files. I can use my $20 subscription’s 5 hour limit in mere seconds.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#356

Post by inglor_cz »

dns_snek wrote: post #344
inglor_cz wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Socialist economies are like "adblock for your life"." Ever actually lived in anything approaching one? Yeah, if the stores are empty, it does not make sense to produce ads for stuff that isn't there ... ... but we still had ads on TV, surprisingly, even for stuff that was in shortage (= almost everything). Why? Because the Plan said so, and disrespecting the Plan too openly would stray dangerously close to the crim…

None of that is inherent to socialism. There can be good and bad management, freedom and authoritarianism in any economic system.

Socialist economies larger than kibbutzes could only be created and sustained by totalitarian states. Socialism means collective ownership of means of production.

And people won't give up their shops and fields and other means of production to the government voluntarily, at least not en masse. Thus they have to be forced at a gunpoint, and they always were.

All the subsequent horror is downstream from that. This is what is inherent to building a socialist economy: mass expropriation of the former "exploitative class". The bad management of the stolen assets is just a consequence, because ideologically brainwashed partisans are usually bad at managing anything including themselves.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#357

Post by unkulunkulu »

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…

Ok, this article inspired some positivity in my view. Here comes, of course a disclaimer that this is just "wishful thinking", but still.

So we are in the process of "adapting a technology". Welcome, keep calm, observe, don't be ashamed to feel emotions like fear, excitement, anger and all else.

While adapting, we learn how to use it better and better. At first, we try "do all the work for me", then "ok, that was bad, plan what you would do, good, adjust, ok do it like this" etc etc.

A couple of years into the future this knowledge is just "passed on". If productivity grew and we "figured out how to get more out of the universe", then no jobs had to be lost, just readapted. And "investors" get happy not by "replacing workers", but by "reaping win-win rewards" from the universe at large.

There are dangers of course, like "maybe this is truly a huge win-win, but some loses can be hidden, like ecology", but "I hope there are people really addressing these problems and this win-win will help them be more productive as well".

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#358

Post by beAbU »

injidup wrote: post #255
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Maybe the take is that those reports that people took a day to write were read by nobody in the first place and now those reports are being written faster and more of them are being produced but still nobody reads them. Thus productivity doesn't change. The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better.

The managerial class are like cats and closed doors.

Ofcourse they don't read the reports, who has time to read it? But don't even think about not sending the report, they like to have the option of reading it if they choose to do so.

A closed door removes agency from a cat, an absent report removes agency from a manager.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#359

Post by t43562 »

majormajor wrote: post #250
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…

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 com…

Code may have to compile but that's a lowish bar and since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass.

In all areas where there's less easy ways to judge output there is going to be correspondingly more value to getting "good" people. Some AI that can produce readable reports isn't "good" - what matters is the quality of the work and the insight put into it which can only be ensured by looking at the workers reputation and past history.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#360

Post by anon-3988 »

Stromgren wrote: post #321
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.

You are forgetting that they are now going to use AI to summarize it back.
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