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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

#601

Post by wolvesechoes »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #523
bubblewand wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An odd tendency I’ve noticed about Graeber is that the more someone apparently dislikes his work, the more it will seem like they’re talking about totally different books from the ones I read.

Because he uses private framings of concepts that are well understood. So if your first encounter is through Graeber you’re going to have friction with every other understanding. If you’ve read much else you will say “hold on a minute, what’s about …”

> If you’ve read much else

If you've read much else you should be able to engage with text properly, and construct charitable interpretations of author's claims or arguments.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#602

Post by blitzar »

abraxas wrote: post #64
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…

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 work itself simply has no discernable economic value

i'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on sunday

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#603

Post by weatherlite »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #545
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…

> In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? In finance, you have to produce truly astounding amounts of regulatory reports that won't be read... until there is a crash, or a lawsuit, or an investigation etc. And then they better have been right!

Got it that's a fair point - you're saying many companies deal with heaps of regulations and expediting that isn't really adding to productivity. I agree with you here. But even if 50% of what a company does is shit no one cares about - surely there's the other 50% that actually matters - no? Otherwise how does the company survive financially.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#604

Post by drnick1 »

nkrisc wrote: post #416
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.

This just highlights the absurdity of having your employer responsible for your health insurance and managing your taxes for you. These should be handled by the government, equally for all.

> These should be handled by the government, equally for all.

This is certainly possible, but it's called communism.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#606

Post by Gracana »

jorvi wrote: post #580
Dan_- wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Hehe, yeah there's some terms that just are linguistically unintuitive. "Skill floor" is another one. People generally interpret that one as "must be at least this tall to ride", but it actually means "amount of effort that translates to result". Something that has a high skill floor (if you write "high floor of skill" it makes more sense) means that with very little input you can gain a lot of result. Whereas a low…

Are you sure about skill floor? I've only ever heard it used to describe the skill required to get into something, and skill ceiling describes the highest level of mastery. I've never heard your interpretation, and it doesn't make sense to me.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#607

Post by simonw »

vrighter wrote: post #541
simonw wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training costs are fixed. Inference costs are variable. The difference matters.

No they are not. They are exponentially increasing. Due to the exponential scaling needed for linear gain. Otherwise they'd fall behind their competition.

Fixed cost here means that the training costs stay the same no matter how many customers you have - unlike serving costs which have to increase to serve more people.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#608

Post by epiccoleman »

abraxas wrote: post #64
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…

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.

At least in my experience, there's another mechanism at play: people aren't making it visible if AI is speeding them up. If AI means a bugfix card that would have taken a day takes 15 minutes, well, that's the work day sorted. Why pull another card instead of doing... something that isn't work?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#609

Post by bunderbunder »

JMKH42 wrote: post #592
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.

I’m thinking survivorship bias here. “Information Technology” is such a wide term, and we immediately think of the IT we currently use. Many of us can’t even remember all the blind alleys we wasted resources on in the ‘80s, especially those of us who weren’t there. I count myself among that group because I was a kid and didn’t pay much attention to business.

But I can say that, judging by historical artifacts, a lot of it was along the same broad lines as AI. And we maybe don’t realize how serious people were about it back then. The technology that actually changed the world was so comparatively boring and pragmatic that the stuff that was being hyped back then seems comically overwrought. It’s easy to assume it must have been a joke all along.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#610

Post by DonnyV »

I think the reason tech didn't help productivity until the late 90s is pretty obvious. The internet was missing. Computers needed the internet to make them useful to everyone. So the question should be.

What is Ai missing that will make it useful to everyone?

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