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AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#701

Post by cindyllm »

palmotea wrote: post #697
wiseowise wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No. If that's the case, your statement was unclear: since you didn't specify who else thinks those people were cattle, the implication is that you think it. Especially since you prefaced your statement with "I’d argue." I never said it was clear? Two commenters got it right, two wrong, so it wasn’t THAT unobvious. > What indication has "the top" given to show they have that kind of foresight and control? The closes…

>> What indication has "the top" given to show they have that kind of foresight and control? The closest is the AI-bros advocacy of UBI, which (for the record) has gone nowhere. > Tech bros selling “no more software engineers” to cost optimizers, dictatorships in US, Russia, China pressing with their heels on our freedoms, Europe cracking down on encryption, Dutch trying to tax unrealized (!) gains, do I really need…

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Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#702

Post by gjk3 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #437

I accept that AI-mediated productivity might not be what we expect to be. But really, are CEO's the best people to assess productivity? What do they _actually_ use to measure it? Annual reviews? GTFO. Perhaps more importantly, it's not like anything a C-level says can ever be taken at face value when it involved their own business.

Most CEOs of large firms arent all that involved in the details, so theres no way they can have a true and proper view of the day-to-day operations on the ground level.

Steve Jobs is the only CEO of a large firm that I can re-call that always remained intimately involved.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#703

Post by _DeadFred_ »

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.

And the reason the position and the busy work exist is to have someone who is knowledgeable on the topic/relationship/requirements/whatever for the edge cases that come up (you don't pay me to push the button, you pay me to know when to push the button). AI could be technically filling a roll while its defeating the whole point (familiarity, background knowledge) for a lot of these roles.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#704

Post by everybodyknows »

alephnerd wrote: post #192
tstrimple wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On hacker news, a very tech literate place I think this is the prior you should investigate. That may be what HN used to be. But it's been a long time since it has been an active reality. You can still see actual expert opinions on HN, but they are the minority more and more.

I think one longtime HN user (Karrot_Kream I think) pinpointed the change in HN discourse to sometime in mid 2022 to early 2023 when the rate of new users spiked to 40k per month and remained at that elevated rate. From personal experience, I've also noticed that some of the most toxic discourse and responses I've received on this platform are overwhelmingly from post-2022 users.

HN got a write-up in a highly political, non-technical magazine around that time.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#705

Post by OkayPhysicist »

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.

See, this is an opportunity. Company provides AI tool, monitors for cases where AI output is being fed as AI input. In such cases, flag the entire process for elimination.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#706

Post by wolvesechoes »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #638
wolvesechoes wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You have written bunch of comments regarding advertising, single comment criticizing Graeber for using concepts in uncommon way, and one reply to my comment that doesn't really connect with the content of that comment.

Did I miss something?

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#707

Post by plaidfuji »

saezbaldo wrote: post #535

One underexplored reason: companies can't give AI agents real authority. The moment an agent needs to do anything beyond summarizing text — update a CRM, transfer funds, modify infrastructure — the security question kills it. No one wants an agent that can take irreversible actions with no approval chain. Until the trust architecture problem is solved, AI stays in read-only mode for most enterprises.

This is the biggest bottleneck. To realize the “replacement of white collar workers” fever dream, (which is, I still believe, technically feasible), you need the agent that replaces them to have all of the context they had. All of the emails, all of the Slacks, all of the meeting minutes, access to private corporate systems and files, etc. I can’t think of a single company that would want to turn all of that over to OpenAI.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#708

Post by plaidfuji »

qgin wrote: post #671

This may mean the centaur era will be shorter than expected. If we take as a given that: * AI is doing real work * Humans using AI don't seem to get more done with AI than without There is a huge economic pressure to remove humans and just let the AI do the work without them as soon as possible.

I suspect this may be the case. There’s inherent inefficiency in having a human forced to translate everything into context for the LLM. You don’t get the full benefit until you allow it to be fully plugged in.

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#709

Post by bdangubic »

plaidfuji wrote: post #707
saezbaldo wrote: post #535

One underexplored reason: companies can't give AI agents real authority. The moment an agent needs to do anything beyond summarizing text — update a CRM, transfer funds, modify infrastructure — the security question kills it. No one wants an agent that can take irreversible actions with no approval chain. Until the trust architecture problem is solved, AI stays in read-only mode for most enterprises.

This is the biggest bottleneck. To realize the “replacement of white collar workers” fever dream, (which is, I still believe, technically feasible), you need the agent that replaces them to have all of the context they had. All of the emails, all of the Slacks, all of the meeting minutes, access to private corporate systems and files, etc. I can’t think of a single company that would want to turn all of that over to…

> I can’t think of a single company that would want to turn all of that over to OpenAI

you’d be surprised… the largest IP in the majority of cases is the codebase itself. once that hurdle was crossed the rest is easy decision

Re: AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox

#710

Post by jasondigitized »

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.

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Stewart Butterfield calls these ""Hyper-realistic work like activities"
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