I think diminishing returns, as the author starts to allude to near the end of the post, is a big reason. To take the example of word processing, the biggest improvement to my workflow of the past 10-15 years is probably either being able to collaborate on documents simultaneously or to be able to view them on a phone. I actually edit documents simultaneously quite a lot, but I’m not sure it’s a huge productivity boost or that common.
I’m also in camp The Great Divergence.
Learning and using the tools to become multiples more productive is relatively hard, still.
In programming, most people still struggle with syntax. The few that get past struggle with conciseness. The few that get past end up managing everyone else instead of solving problems. LLMs move maybe a few percent up the ladder, but hardly enough to matter atm.
In other fields, there’d need to be breakthroughs, otherwise it’s literally scale. Ex: manufacturing is labor intensive and/or capital intensive, w/o a breakthrough like… robots.
I understood The Great Divergence as meaning there are large performance gains, but only for certain people, who are better at resisting distractions brought on by new technology. But my conclusion is closer to there being large performance gains but only for a tiny minority of tasks that happen to really benefit from them and more modest gains otherwise. E.g., smart phones are a great technical achievement, but they’re not a huge improvement most of the time—we already had laptops for most portable productivity needs.
Portable productivity took a huge leap forward with mobile broadband, which came hand in hand with smartphones.
Laptops without access to the internet are far less productive for most people. There are so many examples of tablets and smartphones with internet connectivity replacing other machines and/or making them resilient. Point of sale systems, hotel room key, ticketing systems, translation services, navigation from any point to any point, whether it be walking, bicycling, driving, or public transit.
The biggest productivity boost I've ever had is switching from excel 2003 to 2007. Before I had a limit of 65k rows, now I had just over a million! A whole new world in calculation had opened up.
I can't really recall anything that's come out since then that matches it.
Tabbed browsing.
And what about distraction coming from tabbed browsing?
How you seen people having 40+ tabs open and claiming, "I don't even know what I'm having here" ..? I've seen this a lot
I'm usually overwhelmed beyond 10-15 open tabs.
Having a computer in one’s pocket connected to broadband internet at almost all times with the capability to navigate, pay, search, communicate (globally, at no cost), photograph, and work on that million row spreadsheet seems close to matching Excel 2003 to 2007.
Obviously, it can distract too, but for me, it’s easily been a net positive for productivity.
Please, could you elaborate how it has worked for you?
Specifically how do the productivity gains balance out all the available distractions?
Or are you just particularly talented at singleminded focus?
Mostly, I remember the inefficient of life before smartphones.
A very specific thing I was unable to do before was pull up a video on how to fix almost anything, anytime. House projects, car repair, networking/computer issues at someone else’s house, etc.
Another is checking stock and comparing prices while I am shopping. I waste near zero time finding items and where are in a store, and finding the best price I can buy them at.
Yet another is taking pictures for my reference, or to send to others instead of having to describe something. Being able to video call has made resolving so many problems quicker and easier.
Product manuals are at my fingertips. Buying a flight. Researching a vacation while sitting on mass transit. Finding places to eat withe menus amenable to my family’s taste while on the go.
Thank you for the reply!
This determination will swing wildly between huge positive and negative depending on what you use the phone for at work or during other "productive" activities, as well as what you define a productive activity (is watching a film on your phone after work productive? Depends on outlook and who you ask).
A field engineer with access to manuals, video calls, a camera, an ERP app and the company expenses and so on: massive help. A guy at a desk with a computer: likely to be a distraction that didn't add anything not already available through the computer.
One could say similar for Excel, helping MBAs to sell and destroy organizational value that benefits many built over many years for short term gains benefiting a few.
Also, in your example, I would expect a smartphone to be more distracting to someone that doesn’t already sit at a desk on an internet capable computer. The person in the field is the one who now has the ability to browse the web or whatever, whereas before that was limited to the person sitting at their desk.
Having an addictive propaganda and surveillance device in one's pocket at almost all times.
so where is all this productivity that we are supposed to be getting from AI? I'm struggling to see it in my business or my personal life.
Into the pockets of the 1%
To a first approximation, this fits what one sees in the development of society over the last few decades.
Oh, when will you ever learn? Oh, when will you ever learn?
Marlene Dietrich
Buy some stock and get your share.
Human labour isn't all that important in a modern economy, what matters is the capital (hence why capitalism is so successful). To be productive, we need to be building/deploying new capital.
The real capital investment seems to be happening in East Asia. Building productive capital in the West has typically been somewhere between discouraged and illegal in favour of playing games with numbers. In the English speaking world we've even managed to disconnect GDP from energy and now people are confused why GDP goes up but real living standards don't change all that much and everyone is shifting to fixed-pie thinking.
> Building productive capital in the West has typically been somewhere between discouraged and illegal in favour of playing games with numbers.
You clearly have a different view of capital than me. Games of capital are exactly playing with numbers in my book. And especially post-Reagan new economy. The best way to make money is to have money. Or assets, rather, but same same. Even a few good years in tech or a decent inheritance lump sum + mediocre hands-off “investment” can yield higher than eg being a full time paramedic.
Is capital that is used to "produce" more capital actually productive, though? If you do finance games to instantiate money to open, say, a mine on credit and produce iron, clearly yes by most standards. If that money is instantiated just so it can sit in a ledger and make more money to also sit in a ledger, but most of that money never actually gets used for anything "real", then maybe not.
If the concept of "production" is simply equivalent to numbers in ledgers going up, then of course capital is productive. It's almost tautologically defined, you might as well call money "productivium".
However, if you define "productivity" as something else like "building things" or "improving life quality", or "increasing biodiversity" (yes, those things can be in tension, like the iron mine, and you can wish for "bad" things too: killing people is "production" in war, perhaps) then it's not a foregone conclusion that all capital is inherently productive.
"Ah yes", you say, "but that money that's reinvested elsewhere will eventually be used for something productive in the second sense". Perhaps, perhaps not, or maybe just some, but even if so, it's still possible for someone who doesn't live in "elsewhere" to have the sense that the capital has not been productive of practical value. And many, not all, but many, people might reasonably be wondering if there's so, so much much-vaunted "value" sloshing around, why it doesn't seem to manifest in their lives.
Yeah that’s what I meant. Capital can be used for non-zero-sum games and increase the size of the pie. That’s certainly the narrative of the current central-bank-inflationary-fiat hegemony – some fisherman who wants to buy a boat, or a farmer buying land and equipment. That’s why we (allegedly) accept the that the money in our wallets and bank accounts lose their purchasing power.
However, my understanding is that the reality is quite different. That the majority of money creation (70%+) is issued as debt for asset transfers. In either case, the idea that capital, in general, is not just a proxy for, but equivalent to “productivity”, means that the system is self-reinforcing; the only outcome is success, and the only fix is more of the same system. If I argue that say functional programming is the best way to program, I have to define an external metric in which another paradigm can win. Otherwise it’s just blind belief.
> capital (hence why capitalism is so successful)
Could you expand on this a bit? Isn't capital important precisely because capitalism (private ownership of the means of production, i.e., capital) is the system we operate in?
The king is the sovereign because all the men obey his commands, and all the men obey his commands because he is the king.
Well the basic question here is something like "how do we maximise material comfort?". The answer is pretty obvious - machines. Humans haven't changed much in the last million-odd years, all the improvements since around year 0 AD have been improvements in what machines (ie, capital) we build.
We had a long period where the people with highest social status were war-leaders and we chose them without much care (often a hereditary aristocracy). That led to pretty grim outcomes. It turns out if we award highest status to the people who own and deploy capital efficiently we get absurd amounts of capital produced and this frankly ridiculous society where a tiny group of really driven men seem to just build everything.
So yes, capital is important because we declared it to be so, but we declared it to be so because the society with more capital wins wars. Sometimes by driving over the opposition in that capital, gotta respect a good tank charge. More capital is just better, and capitalism is the system that is most effective at encouraging people to build more capital.
> Human labour isn't all that important in a modern economy
Please elaborate? While this might change in the coming decades with autonomous robots, every economy that I'm even vaguely familiar with would grind to a halt in a matter of hours if humans stopped working.
The vast majority of the value add in the economy is being done by capital. If you had a choice between 20% of the humans working/100% of the capital or 100% of the humans/20% of the capital, the low-human one would be workable but disruptive. The low capital scenario would be the worst crisis in the history of humanity.
I don’t think this is true. Or, rather, I think this is only true if you define “losing capital” in a very specific way that isn’t consistent with reality.
What “gaining” capital looks like is “we upgraded our ovens from the 1980s to brand new ones with steam” or something. So losing that capital would look the same as well. We would lose the luxuries, not just a random assortment of capital that would make everything totally disfunctional.
Whereas, losing 80% of the workers generally doesn’t work ever. We’ve never seen 80% of employees go on strike at a company and the company keeps working. Maybe you could use twitter as a counter-example but I think anything more significant than a social media company (hospital, etc) would be a disaster (and I think most people would consider twitter a disaster as well).
You didn't account for depreciation; for example the rollback to the 1980s ovens probably fails because they don't work after 45 years.
> We’ve never seen 80% of employees go on strike at a company and the company keeps working.
Typically because the strikers are physically blocking access to the building in the cases I've seen. The capital doesn't just sit idly because the owners are in a state of deep despair, but because the strikers are forcing it to be so.
Strikes fall apart pretty quickly without government support because of dynamics like that. Naturally speaking, with plain property right logic, the strikers lose all their ability to produce, the capitalist loses a fraction of their ability. It is very lopsided.
> Human labour isn't all that important in a modern economy
We keep hearing this from allegedly credible people and institutions, yet when people stop buying products (with the result of their own productivity) or worse still, go on strike, suddenly the gears of the machine stop cold and the leadership of whatever industry is crying to the government to end the strike for them because negotiation is hard.
I have heard since I was a kid in the 90's how it was ludicrous to pay McDonalds workers more than $10 an hour because McDonalds wouldn't make any money that way, and those employees would be replaced with robots. Today the one nearest me is offering $15 an hour, and they kiiiind of automated the cashiers? Not really though, you can still order from a person if you want, and everyone past that step who's actually making and handing you the food is still very much a human, with seemingly little if any progress towards those positions being automated.
Mind you, McDonalds is apparently not making money anymore but that was the status quo pre-pandemic when they still paid workers like complete shit. That seems to have far more to do with McDonalds corporate blowing shit tons of cash on celebrity endorsements and ineffective advertising, as well as heavy product discounting on a product that's just not kept up with industry/social trends.
And all that's past the pandemic and the drama it created both with allowing many workers the time and capital for themselves to ascend out of tons of these shitty jobs which has left a gap in employment since that no one has stopped whining about.
Anyway the point is the "post human labor" economy is largely a joke, for starters, if you don't have humans buying your products, you don't have a business, and nobody can buy them if nobody is working. Second, because despite the constant threat of automation levied against working class people, we really do seem to be hitting the limits, at least in present technology, of what we can make machines do.
> In the English speaking world we've even managed to disconnect GDP from energy and now people are confused why GDP goes up but real living standards don't change all that much and everyone is shifting to fixed-pie thinking.
I mean I don't think that's so much a result of GDP being disconnected from energy (nor do I have a solid grasp of what that means) as much as more and more of the results of productivity seem to go into the pockets of a handful of people while just getting by gets more expensive year-over-year, and people tend to notice that.
>Second, because despite the constant threat of automation levied against working class people, we really do seem to be hitting the limits, at least in present technology, of what we can make machines do.
This is the real problem society has, especially with subdued and declining fertility rates.
Most societies have promised people benefits based on 7%+ annual returns, and those returns need to come from somewhere. Without the high fertility rate, the returns were coming from automation and massive economies of scale.
However, there has been a plateau in automation for many high touch businesses (food, healthcare, construction/trades), so those cost increases are being as political fighting over who gets what from society’s productive. And old people control most of the political and economic capital, as they, along with their heirs, have an interest in maintaining their expected share of the economy’s productivity, even though it means younger people get less.
Yes, a tangent however...
McDonalds used to be about fast. But now I go in, and watch people running around and prepping food for Uner Eats or whatever.
Meanwhile the person who actually came there, me, waits 5+ minutes for a cashier to even come to the front, and 15 minutes for food.
McDonalds has had delivery automated at least. And it's the reason I stopped going there.
I can sit down at an independent cafe or restaurant, order, get better food faster, hand made, with nicer surroundings, for the same price as McDonalds.
They're the biggest rip off ever, and this didn't used to be the case.
Honestly the speed isn't usually a factor for me, I order in the app and get the table service if I'm eating there, or get it curbside. That said I still end up spending at or near what I would spend for a Chipotle or a Freddy's/Five Guys, and McDonalds isn't nearly that fucking good. All fast food has gotten more expensive save kind of Taco Bell which still rocks a menu that has consistently good new items being moved in and out, and you can get out of there for under $20 for two people and have a solid amount of food.
But yeah, the value proposition blows.