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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

#631

Post by bob1029 »

The analogy that an LLM is simply an amplifier is apt for most general business.

If you've already got a very effective team with clear vision/goals, this technology will almost certainly help to some degree.

If you've got a sinking ship of a business, this technology will likely drag you down faster.

You always have to work backward from the customer into the technology. AI will never change that. I've found myself waffling on advice to some clients regarding AI because whether or not they can effectively leverage it depends more on what the people in the business are willing to do than what the technology can do.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#632

Post by rkomorn »

graybeardhacker wrote: post #624
rkomorn wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the people who think more companies with fewer employees is a good thing. I already feel spammed to death by desperate requests for my consumption as is.

Because: 1. One person companies are better at giving the wealth to the worker. 2. With thousands of companies the products can be more targeted and each product can serve fewer people and still be profitable Then companies won't need to spam you to convince you that you need something you don't. Or that their product will help you in ways it can't. Once person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team tryi…

> Once person companies will not have a 100 person marketing team trying to inject ads into ever corner of your life.

Because these one person companies will scale up everything with AI except marketing/advertising? Consider me skeptical.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#633

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

stephenr wrote: post #575
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m bearish on AI, but I still think this is disingenuous. My grade school math teachers were probably not well-versed in Calculus and Real Analysis, but they helped me learn my time tables just as well. AI is great at exposing you to what you don’t even know you don’t know: your personal unknown unknowns, the complexity you’re completely unaware of.

> My grade school math teachers were probably not well-versed in Calculus and Real Analysis, but they helped me learn my time tables just as well. Are you somehow equating basic multiplication to a "bad long term decision"?

No, I was focusing on this quote:

> llms can get me started really fast. Basically it distills the time taken to research

I was saying that it speeds up research by exposing you to the things you don’t know that you don’t know.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#635

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#636

Post by cmiles8 »

topocite wrote: post #459
cmiles8 wrote: post #28

I like AI and use it daily, but this bubble can’t pop soon enough so we can all return to normally scheduled programming. CEOs are now on the downside of the hype curve. They went from “Get me some of that AI!” after first hearing about it, to “Why are we not seeing any savings? Shut this boondoggle down!” now that we’re a few years into bubble, the business math isn’t working, and they only see burning piles of cash…

This is the standard stupidity here based on emotion and denial. This is the narrative that people want to hear. Of course, trying to automate with chatGPT 4o was stupid. Trying to automate with Sonnet 4.6 will work better. Trying to automate with the models a year from now will work all the better. To believe we are going to stop and go back to 2019 at this stage is seriously delusional. I wish it were true. I would…

“Regularly scheduled programming” includes progress, not stasis. It just means the AI hype firehouse runs out of money and we rerun to normal sane progress and productivity enhancements without all the overpricing and under delivering of the last few years.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#637

Post by forinti »

anon-3988 wrote: post #360
Stromgren wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.

You are forgetting that they are now going to use AI to summarize it back.

For all the technology we develop, we rarely invest in processes. Once in a blue moon some country decides to revamp its bureaucracy, when it should really be a continuous effort (in the private sector too).

OTOH, what happens continuously is that technology is used to automate bureaucracy and even allows it to grow some complexity.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#638

Post by groundzeros2015 »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #601
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please read my comments here engaging with the ideas in the text and specifically your concern that bullshit jobs are just jobs that don’t feel important.
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