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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

#611

Post by Retric »

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.

Moving some function to the government doesn’t eliminate the need for it. Something would still need to tell the government what you’re paid unless you’re advocating for anarchy or communism.

Also, part of that etc is doing payroll so there’s some reason for you to show up at work every day.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#612

Post by rybosworld »

Companies over a certain size (say more than 25+ employees), are universally bad at:

- measuring productivity

- adapting to change

This article just reinforces that. Past a certain headcount, executives have little to no understanding of what IC day-to-day is like.

AI tooling doesn't fix the bureaucracy the c-suite helped to create.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#613

Post by giantg2 »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
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…

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…

"if using personal accounts"

InfoSec and Legal would like a word with you...

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#614

Post by alephnerd »

mrtksn wrote: post #230
alephnerd wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's your persona? How are you pricing and packaging? Who is your buyer? Are you D2C? Consumer? Replacing EAs? Replacing Project Managers? ... You need to answer these questions in order to decide whether a Show HN makes sense versus a much more targeted launch. If you do not know how to answer these questions you need to find a cofounder asap. Technology is commodified. GTM, sales, and packaging is what turns techn…

The persona is, someone who knows what are they doing but need someone to actually automate their work routine. I.e. maybe it’s a crypto trader that makes decisions on signals interpretation so they can create a trading bot that executes on their method. Maybe its a compliance who needs automate some routine like checking details further when some conditions arise. Or maybe a social media manager that needs to modera…

That's too broad. You aren't going to get any nibbles.

You need to narrow it down to a single and specific persona and business domain.

This is because it takes years to fully flesh out and productionize a workflow from scratch, so concentrating on a business domain you know intimately well helps you build that muscle, which you can then repeat if you are able to hit revenue metrics for a Series A/B.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#615

Post by g-mork »

lqstuart wrote: post #533
g-mork wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've had some luck with this idea of keeping the "Clauded" bits separate where possible. Do you really care if it crates a spaghetti mess if the result is some visually beautiful low trust site that lives in its own repo entirely? vs. letting it run in autoapprove mode inside a module where critical hand-written crypto code exists

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#616

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#617

Post by analog31 »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
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…

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…

I'm not sure about the comparison either, but the cost of operating the LLM should include the worker's wages.

I read an article yesterday about people working insane hours at companies that have bet heavily on AI. My interpretation is that a worker runs out of juice after a few hours, but the AI has no limit and can work its human tender to death.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#618

Post by SKILNER »

If you've ever undertaken the task of documenting entire workflows, then you know that you quickly put up the white flag at the word "entire".

When you actually talk to people about what they do there are often many, many nuances, micro-events, micro-decisions and micro-actions in their work. This is why it can take days/weeks/months to completely train a new person for a job.

This level of detail is barely documented - anywhere. There is a huge amount of information buried in workflows that AI has barely had access to for training. A lot of this is more in the realm of world models, rather than LLMs.

So imagine trying to use AI to improve these workflows it knows so little about. Then imagine AI trying to reinvent them across an organization.

We find these use cases where AI provides great value - totally true - but these barely scratch the surface of what goes on.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#619

Post by boxingdog »

torben-friis wrote: post #42
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…

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…

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