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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

#591

Post by kakacik »

o3dd wrote: post #551
Drakim wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that has zero effect on revenue, it only affects profit.

I wrote awhile ago on here that he should stick to his domain. I was downvoted big time. Ah, I love it when people provide an example so it can finally be exposed without me having to say anything. Unfortunately this is a huge problem on here - many people step outside of their domains, even if on the surface it seems simple, but post gibberish and completely mangled stuff. How does this benefit people who get expose…

If you don't know you are wrong but have an itch to polish your ego a bit then what's stopping you (them), right.

People form very strong opinions on topic they barely understand. I'd say since they know little the opinions come mostly from emotions, which is hardly a good path for objective and deeper knowledge.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#592

Post by JMKH42 »

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…

>And so we should expect AI to look the same -

Maybe! Or it might never pan out, or it may pan out way better. Complicated things like this rarely turn out the way people expect, no matter how smart.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#593

Post by weatherlite »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #469
weatherlite wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 implication is that companies in a private market can't possibly be hugely inefficient for irrational reasons that can ultimately be self-harming. An interesting take.

I used the term "private market" when I actually meant the private sector. I just mean all labor that isn't government owned - public companies, private companies etc. So yes - in a reasonably functioning capitalist market (which the U.S still is in my eyes) I expect gross inefficiencies to not be prevalent.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#594

Post by snarf21 »

aurareturn wrote: post #548
aurareturn wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back to a time at the start of Youtube. Now answer these questions: And what will those people who make videos on Youtube do? Produce videos in uber-saturated categories? Or magically 9900 more media channels will be created, all of them successful?

To follow this up, one of my favorite channels on Youtube is Outdoor Boys. It's just a father who made videos once a week doing outdoor things like camping with his family. He has amassed billions of views on his channel. Literally a one-man operation. He does all the filming, editing himself. No marketing. His channel got so popular that he had to quit to protect his family from fame. Many large production companies…

Serious question: but aren't there thousands of other guys doing almost the same thing and getting almost no views? Even if there are lots of new channels, there aren't going to be lots of winners

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#595

Post by noisy_boy »

bazmattaz wrote: post #245
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

You are in the "not-enough-AI" stage - keep increasing your usage but try to keep it very gradual to avoid entering the "do-more-AI-within-this-budget" stage too soon. It seems like the firing would be in following stages:

1. too old/expensive

2. not using AI

3. using AI but not productive

4. productive using AI but not within AI budget

5. reduce AI budget and GOTO 3

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#596

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Aurornis wrote: post #167
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greaber’s best book is his ethnography “Lost People” and it’s one of his least read works. Bullshit Jobs was never intended to be read as seriously as it is criticized.

Honestly this is how every critique of Graeber goes in my experience: As soon as his works are discussed beyond surface level, the goalposts start zooming around so fast that nothing productive can be discussed. I tried to respond to the specific conversation about Bullshit Jobs above. In my experience, the way this book is brought up so frequently in online conversations is used as a prop for whatever the commenter…

Well said - thanks for the reply.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#597

Post by giancarlostoro »

TimByte wrote: post #390
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…

I suspect the real breakthrough for teams won't be better raw models, but better ways to make the "AI-assisted thinking" legible and shareable across the group, instead of trapped in personal prompt histories

I sort of have this indirectly solved with a project I'm working on inspired by Beads. One thing I added is as you have the LLM work on tasks, you can sync them directly to GitHub, I would love to add other ticketing / task backends to it, but I mostly just use GitHub. You can also create them on GitHub and sync them down and claim a task (the tool will post a comment on GitHub that you've claimed the work). I can see people using it to collaborate easier, but for the time being it's just me using it for myself. ;)

These tasks become your prompt once refined. I basically braindump to Claude, have it make tasks from my brain dump. Then I tell Claude to ask me clarifying questions, it updates the tasks and then I have Claude do market research for some or all tasks to see what the most common path is to solve a given problem and then update the tasks.

https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#598

Post by weatherlite »

nananana9 wrote: post #508
weatherlite wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know what to tell you aside from "just go and work at a large private company and see". I'm not smart enough to understand the macro-economics or incentive structures that lead to this happening, but I've seen many 100+ man teams that output whose output is something you could reasonably expect from a 5 man team.

Sorry I meant to say the private sector, not sure if it changes the argument though since you seem to believe inefficiencies are all over the place - in public companies, private etc. I've worked in tech all my life and in general if you were grossly inefficient you'd get fired. Now tech may be a high efficiency / low bullshit industry but I'm assuming in general if you are truly shit at your job you'd get fired no matter the industry.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#599

Post by lock1 »

vrighter wrote: post #538
lock1 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

  > 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.
You just demonstrated how hard it is to "check" an email or text message by missing the point of my reply.

  > "Now imagine trying to spot that one missing comma among the 20kloc of code"
I assume your previous comment tries to bring up Python's dynamic typing & late binding nature and use it as an example of how it can be problematic when someone tries to blindly merge 20kloc LLM-generated Python code.

My reply, "Your example will unambiguously resolve to an error in a standard-conforming Python interpreter." tried to respond to the possibility of such an issue. Even though it's probably not the program behavior you want, Python, being a programming language, will be 100% guaranteed to interpret it unambiguously.

I admit, I should have phrased it a bit more unambiguously than leaving it like that.

Even if it's hard, you can try running a type checker to statically catch such problems. Even if it's not possible in cases of heavy usage of Python's dynamic typing feature, you can just run it and check the behavior at runtime. It might be hard to check, but not impossible.

On the other hand, it's impossible to perform a perfectly consistent "check" on this reply or an email written in a natural language, the person reading it might interpret the message in a completely different way.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#600

Post by groundzeros2015 »

wiseowise wrote: post #554
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See what I mean? What you see as a bullshit job is just completely misunderstanding how human beings work. - Which products get included in the candidate list? Every product in existence which claims use? - how many results can it return? And in what order? - which attributes or description of the product is provided to the llm? Who provides it? - how are the claims in those descriptions verified? - what if my busine…

I was replying to: > The only way advertising won't exist or won't be needed is when humanity becomes a hive mind and removes all competition. I don't need advertisement to pick the best product for myself. I have a list of requirements that I need fulfilled – why do I need advertisement for it?

You just don’t know what advertising is. How did you determine which products were available? How did you determine their attributes?
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