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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#531

Post by disiplus »

naasking wrote: post #438
t43562 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lookin…

> since the AI is writing the tests it's obvious that they're going to pass That's not obvious at all if the AI writing the tests is different than the AI writing the code being tested. Put into an adversarial and critical mode, the same model outputs very different results.

Even if its a different session it can be enough. But that said i had times where it rewrote tests "because my implementation was now different so the tests needed to be updated" so you have to prompt even that to tell it to not touch the tests.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#532

Post by brazzy »

wiseowise wrote: post #493
brazzy wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, the entire statement betrays a combination of ignorance and arrogance that is best explained by them seeing most everyone else as beneath them.

Hard miss. GP is right, and your assumptions say more about you than about me. :^)

My observation is about what your assumptions say about you, and that's not a miss.

Nobody really understands a job they haven't done themselves, and "arguing" that 90% of them are "bullshit" has no other possible explanation than a combination of ignorance (you don't understand the jobs well enough to judge whether they are useful) and arrogance (you think you can make that judgement better than the 90% of people doing those jobs).

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#533

Post by lqstuart »

g-mork wrote: post #214
lqstuart wrote: post #184

I was in the “AI is grossly overhyped” camp because I work on large distributed deep learning training jobs and AI is indeed worthless for those, and will likely always be worthless since the APIs change constantly and the iteration loop is too cumbersome to constantly resubmit broken jobs to a training cluster. Then I started working on some basic grpc/fullstack crap that I absolutely do not care about, at all, but…

this weirdly skirts my own experience yet somehow still read like sarcasm hehe. I think if we just return to calling it intelligent autocomplete expectations for productivity gain would be better established. trying to hacksmash Claude into outputting something it simply can't just produces endless mess. or getting into a fight pointing out issues with what it's doing and it just piles on extra layer upon layer of gu…

We just haven’t figured out how to use it. You wouldn’t try to create an entire project out of IDE templates, but how many “low code” attempts were there to do just that at some point?

I think there are phases in a project’s lifecycle where it’s more appropriate, at the very beginning and very late. I do not think junior developers should be using it, because it is much much harder to learn and it kills productivity having senior developers review 3000 lines of slop. Just stuff like that needs to be figured out.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#534

Post by fastasucan »

weatherlite wrote: post #451
fdefitte wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someo…

The goal might be to maximize profits, but that only means that managers want to make sure everyone further down the chain are doing whatever they identify to be the best way to accomplish that. How do you do that? Reports.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#535

Post by saezbaldo »

One underexplored reason: companies can't give AI agents real authority. The moment an agent needs to do anything beyond summarizing text — update a CRM, transfer funds, modify infrastructure — the security question kills it. No one wants an agent that can take irreversible actions with no approval chain. Until the trust architecture problem is solved, AI stays in read-only mode for most enterprises.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#536

Post by notepad0x90 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #396
notepad0x90 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, you're very wrong. There is typically lots of good communication -- one way. The stuff that doesn't get communicated down to worker bees is intentional. "CPUs" aren't all that fast either, unless you make them by providing incentives. if you're a well paid worker who likes their job, i can see why you would think that, but most people aren't that. Meetings are work, as much as IPC and network calls are…

Meetings can be work, but often they are a waste of time. Often they are only done, because the company has not found a better way to structure itself, which is also accepted by the management lawyer, who often has a profound fear of loss of control and likes to micromanage. If you can zone out for most of the meeting, and not experience negative effects from that, then the meeting was a waste of your time.

it's not a waste of your time if you're getting paid for it, that's why you are there. You're not there to be otherwise "productive" you're there to do what the company wants you to do. you might say they're inefficient, but are things like company outings efficient? b.s. townhall calls? half the time it's just managers trying to hear their own voice in front of everyone. You're not there to write code or fix things, you're there to make those pay-check signers happy. placate to their ego if that's what they want.

That said, often, meetings are much more efficient means of syncing information than slack/chat or emails. call it "real-time active communication with rich context" if it sounds more technical. you can communicate in voice tones, body language, timing,etc.. what you can't using other means. and communicate doesn't mean just talk or listen for the sake of it, it can me brainstorm, understand requirements and expectations better, prevent misunderstandings and other wasted effort.

In my experience, things that exist as patterns like this in systems are always important, but it's also important to use them as intended, and not abuse them excessively.

Simply extracting the most value out of individual contributors isn't typically the goal of white collar management. as in my earlier example, you won't see order pickers at amazon warehouses attend meetings all day. their time at work is valued differently than a white collar workers'.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#537

Post by K0balt »

This is because the vast majority of white collar activity in a large corporation produces no direct economic value.

Making it easier/better just means more/higher quality “worthless” work is performed. The incentives in the not-directly -productive parts of organizations are to keep busy and maintain a stream of signals of productivity. For this , AI just raises the bar. The 25% of the work that -is- important to producing economic value just gets reduced to 15%.

The workforce in large orgs that is most AI adjacent is already idling along in terms of production of direct economic value. Making them 10x more productive in nonproductive work will not impact critical metrics in a short timeframe.

It’s worth noting that these “not directly productive” activities actually can (and often do) produce value, eventually. Things like brand identity, culture, and meta-innovation, vision (search-space) are intangibles that present as cost centers but can prove invaluable in longer timescales if done right.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#538

Post by vrighter »

lock1 wrote: post #374
vrighter wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email. Consider, for example, the following python code: x = (5) vs x = (5,) One is a literal 5, and the other is a single element tuple containing the number 5. But more importantly, both are valid code. Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code one so proudly claims AI helped them "write", especially if it's in a cold path. You wo…

> Code is much much harder to check for errors than an email. Disagree. Even though performing checks on dynamic PLs is much harder than on static ones, PLs are designed to be non-ambiguous. There should be exactly 1 interpretation for any syntactically valid expression. Your example will unambiguously resolve to an error in a standard-conforming Python interpreter. On the other hand, natural languages are not restri…

Tell me you've never written any python without telling me you've never written any python...

Those are both syntactically valid lines of code. (it's actually one of python's many warts). They are not ambiguous in any way. one is a number, the other is a tuple. They return something of a completely different type.

My example will unambiguously NOT give an error because they are standard conforming. Which you would have noticed had you actually took 5 seconds to try typing them in the repl.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#540

Post by fastasucan »

lelanthran wrote: post #500
Retric wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs you don’t notice or understand often look pointless. HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. In the end when jobs are done right they seem to disappear. We notice crappy software or a poorly done HVAC system not clean carpets.

> HR on the surface seems unimportant, but you’d notice if the company stopped having health insurance or sending your taxes to the IRS etc etc. That's not why companies have HR; sure, it's a nice side-effect , but it's not the reason for HR. HR exists primarily to protect the company from the employees.

I emailed HR and asked what to do to best ask for leave in case of a future event (serious illness with a family member, I just wanted to be one step ahead and make sure I did everything right even in the state of grief).

HR wouldn't tell me what would be the best and most correct course of action, the only thing that they said was that it was my responsibility as an employee to find out. Well, what did they think I was doing.

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