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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

#651

Post by ddtaylor »

K0balt wrote: post #537

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 pr…

There are a lot of people who sit with their laptop open while streaming something, sleeping or messing with their phone while periodically waking up to join a new meeting or fiddle with something to make it look like they are active.

These are the people "shocked" when they are displaced.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#652

Post by bavell »

Gracana wrote: post #606
jorvi wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've also never heard that use of "skill floor" before. The "floor/ceiling" descriptors imply min/max constraints.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#653

Post by nurettin »

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…

> A Claude subscription is 20 bucks per worker

I mean, sure. If you want to use it for 20 minutes and wait for two hours at a time.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#654

Post by lokar »

Aurornis wrote: post #137
gruez wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How viable are the $20/month subscriptions for actual work and are they loss making for Anthropic? I've heard both of people needing to get higher tiers to get anything done in Claude Code and also that the subscriptions are (heavily?) subsidized by Anthropic, so the "just another $20 SaaS" argument doesn't sound too good.

I don't think the assumption that Anthropic is losing money on subscriptions holds up. I think each additional customer provides more revenue than the cost to run their inference, on average. For people doing work with LLMs as an assistant for codebase searching, reviews, double checks, and things like that the $20/month plan is more than fine. The closer you get to vibecoding and trying to get the LLM to do all the…

Why do you think that? Lots of people on this thread saying that, but zero citations.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#655

Post by h0ek »

Yeah, maybe the CEO doesn’t see any impact on productivity — but mine definitely changed. I actually have more time for my own stuff now, because AI quietly handles part of the work for me. Of course, if productivity is measured by how many PowerPoint slides get presented to the board, then sure — nothing changed. Especially when HR reports say “everything looks the same” — because no one is tracking how much work is silently being offloaded to AI. And just to avoid overworking myself, I even asked AI to write this comment so I could focus on something else in the meantime.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#656

Post by Guillaume86 »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #231
whynotminot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also pretty wild to me how people still don’t really even know how to use it. On hacker news, a very tech literate place, I see people thinking modern AI models can’t generate working code. The other day in real life I was talking to a friend of mine about ChatGPT. They didn’t know you needed to turn on “thinking” to get higher quality results. This is a technical person who has worked at Amazon. You can’t expec…

A neighbour of me has a PhD and is working in research at a hospital. He is super smart. Last time he said: "yes yes I know about ChatGPT, but I do not use it at work or home." Therefore, most people wont even know about Gemini, Grok or even Claude.

He said he know about it and your conclusion is that he doesnt know about the other ones...

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#657

Post by sevensor »

fdefitte wrote: post #175
abraxas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

And like the article says, early computerization produced way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion, we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users were able to produce for themselves exactly the computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets became widespread. LLMs haven’t had their spreadsheet moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward, as if more noise meant more productivity.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#658

Post by watwut »

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.

They can be irrational and ineffective. Nevertheless, if LLM are useful, they would still earn more then before.

Regardless of their effectivity, it means LLMs are not useful for them.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#659

Post by csa »

storus wrote: post #391
aurareturn wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future of work is fewer human team members and way more AI assistants. I think companies will need fewer engineers but there will be more companies. Now: 100 companies who employ 1,000 engineers each What we are transitioning to: 1000 companies who employ 10 engineers each What will happen in the future: 10,000 companies who employ 1 engineer each Same number of engineers. We are about to enter an era of explosiv…

It will lead to hollowing out of the substance everywhere. The constant march to more abstraction and simplicity will inevitably end up with AI doing all the work and nobody understanding what is going on underneath, turning technology into magic again. We have seen people losing touch with how things work with every single move towards abstraction, machine code -> C -> Java -> JavaScript -> async/await -> ... -> LLM…

> nobody understanding what is going on underneath

I think many developers, especially ones who come from EE backgrounds, grossly overestimate the number of people needed who understand what is going on underneath.

“Going on underneath” is a lot of interesting and hard problems, ones that true hackers are attracted to, but I personally don’t think that it’s a good use of talented people to have 10s or 100s of thousands of people working on those problems.

Let the tech geniuses do genius work.

Meanwhile, there is a massive need for many millions of people who can solve business problems with tech abstractions. As an economy (national or global), supply is nowhere close to meeting demand in this category.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#660

Post by watwut »

wao0uuno wrote: post #328
palmotea wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling. Cattle? You actually think that about other people?

I think what he meant was that the top 1% ruling class is keeping those bullshit jobs around to keep the poor people (their cattle) occupied so they won't have time and energy to think and revolt.

It is bullshit argunent. The 1% is seeking to fire as many people as possible and with pleasure.

We dont matter to them, one was or the other. They dont see us as a threat, just as bugs.

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