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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

#511

Post by kombookcha »

Dan_- wrote: post #510
kombookcha wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…

> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high… I keep seeing this statement in threads about AI, and maybe it’s just from you, but high SNR is a good thing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio I think the rest of your post is very valid. It’s the mental equivalent of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088

Hah, you got me there! I'll try to keep the ratio flipped correctly next time ;)

I read that article recently, so the similarities might not be entirely coincidental. 'JPEG of thought' is gonna stay in my vocabulary for a while.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#512

Post by [deleted] »

Dan_- wrote: post #510
kombookcha wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of my major concerns about people trying to use these tools for 'efficiency'. The only plausible value in somebody writing a huge report and somebody else reading it is information transfer. LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high, and you will be worse off reading the summary than if you skimmed the first and last pages. In fact, you will be worse off than if you…

> LLM's are notoriously bad at this. The noise to signal ratio is unacceptably high… I keep seeing this statement in threads about AI, and maybe it’s just from you, but high SNR is a good thing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio I think the rest of your post is very valid. It’s the mental equivalent of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47049088

[deleted]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#513

Post by aurareturn »

lelanthran wrote: post #507
aurareturn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

> Today, I maintain a few repos critical to the business without even knowing the programming language they are written in. [...] No, a normal person without a background in software engineering can't do this. Of course they can - if you don't know any of the tech-stack details (i.e. a "normal" user), why can't someone else who also doesn't know the tech-stackc details replace you? What magic sauce do you possess oth…

In the future, they might be able to. Not yet though. I still have a job.

When a non software engineer can build a production app as well as I can, I know I won’t be working as a software engineer anymore. In that world, having great ideas, data, compute, and energy will be king.

I don’t think we will get there within the next 3-4 years. Beyond that, who knows.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#514

Post by nutjob2 »

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…

To me the biggest benefit of LLMs has always been as a learning tol, be it for general queries or "build this so I can get an idea of how it works and get started quickly". There are so many little things that you need to know when trying anything new.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#515

Post by lelanthran »

simiones wrote: post #472
Herring wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/claude-code-is-the-inf...

> Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers. > If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/open-source-game-...

> If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of

This is exactly the wrong approach! Funnel even more money away from productive tasks and into AI? Madness![1]

The only viable solution is being quick with a banhammer - maybe someone should start up a spamhaus type list of every github user who submitted AI slop.

Force them to burn these accounts on the very first spam.

------------

[1] Imagine if we chose this approach to deal with spam - we ask people for more money to hire a warm body to individually verify each email. Do you think spam would be the solved problem it is today?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#517

Post by groundzeros2015 »

tehjoker wrote: post #247
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have you participated in academia before?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#518

Post by finghin »

fdefitte wrote: post #175
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.

[dead]

This is the natural result when the value of businesses is not strongly related to their actual output.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#519

Post by groundzeros2015 »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #333
Wilder7977 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely.

See what I mean? We push on where these fake jobs are and you fallback to a subjective internal definition we can’t inspect.

And now let me remind you of the context. If the real definition of bullshit isn’t economic slack, but internal dissatisfaction then this comment would be false:

> 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.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#520

Post by groundzeros2015 »

simiones wrote: post #439
thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that make advertising a bullshit job? The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition.

Countries can just ban advertising, and hopefully we will slowly move towards this. There are already quite a few specific bans - tobacco advertising is banned, gambling and sex product advertising is only allowed in certain specific situations, billboards and other forms of advertising on public spaces are often banned in large European cities, and so on.

> Countries can just ban advertising

No. They can ban particular modes. They can’t stop people from using power and money to spread ideas.

In the US hedge funds are banned from advertising and all they did is change their forms of presentation to things like presenting at conferences or on podcasts.

If there was a socialist fantasy of a government review board for which all products were submitted before being listed in a government catalog. Then advertising would be lobbying and jockeying that review board to view your product in a particular way. Or merely to go through the process and ensure correct information was kept.

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