Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s?
Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one case you're going to see skyscrapers, commercial airplanes, nuclear power plants, electricity everywhere, cars going at amazing speeds. In the latter case what's the difference, people paying with their phones and different fashion mostly.
'Innovation' in the internet age, say the last 30 years has mostly been limited to enable hedonistic digital consumption with very little impact on how we fundamentally move through the world. The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet. A 100 years ago to 50 years ago meant going from horse carriages to trains and from weeks on a ship to hours on a plane. Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.
That's why productivity growth is low, the world hasn't changed that much. There's still marginal improvements obviously which do add up over time but the 'unprecedent pace of innovation' you hear about from tech evangelists is nowhere.
Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet, a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other? I think it really puts into perspective how much or rather little value those 'innovations' add.
30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use electric motors instead of internal combustion engines.
One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look around for reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing cabinets. If you wanted to know more about something, you probably had to go to a library, which might not even have a book on the topic (maybe if you were particularly determined to know the answer you'd wait a few weeks for an ILL).
Its a bit sad to me that you look at this enormous sea change in how we interact with the world and see Angry Birds.
bogus! I was there, and let me tell you, I get so much more done each day, it's shocking:
- cellphones, the internet and GPS saves insane amounts of time coordinating RL events. I'm never gonna get back the 1000+ hours I spent with paper maps trying to find places, playing "phone tag" coordinating activities, etc. Kids these days, they just have no idea.
- remote work & learning = 2+ hours PER DAY. I used to pay $500 (in today-dollars) a month to sit on the Long Island Railroad and read books. Now I work when I'm ready to be productive. I listen-in on zoom calls, whisper questions to people, read docs, all "soaking up" information. Recently, I got tons of work done while on a grand jury - 21 cases in 8 days and no problem interleaving work, thanks to excellent WiFi and work-from-anywhere.
- e-commerce and youtube = no more repeated trips to the store for stupid shit. I've got a dozen major home improvement projects going at once, with ecomm orders every which way, from lumber to jigsaws, electrical to plumbing. Easy returns means I can experiment more. YouTube means fewer mistakes and far fewer disasters.
- globalization = variety = better tools for the job. No seriously, you have no idea how limited and shitty products used to be. In software, we had no source control let alone CI/CD - reproducibility was not a thing, let alone distributed computing. IRL, I remember trying to buy stuff at Sears and Service Merchandise and the only review system was the store clerk on commission. You can't imagine the BS we put up with, simply for a lack of variety.
(I could go on... you can't imagine healthcare back then... in the starkest definition of "productivity," cancer was often a death sentence even caught early, and now people routine survive stage 4 cancers... also everybody knew people who died young in car accidents, it was tragic but normalized, and then DUI laws and education, crumple zones and airbags all made this rare...)
Now it's true, we "waste" our newfound freedoms binge-watching Netflix, wasting time here on HN, going to the gym, and so on. Put another way, I dunno about you, but my daily/weekly "productivity limit" is not based on output, but on my brain maxxing out, from too many projects, too many names, too many details.
It's also true that many upgrades are "trivial" - vacuums with lights and on/off buttons on the handle; better quality audio and video; 1000s of streaming shows. Back in the day, we had maybe a dozen channels and the quality was often terrible, from mediocre writing and acting, to hilariously simple production values that even pre-dated the demands of 4K. Historical fiction wasn't popular because it sucked. Sci-fi and horror weren't much of a thing because the special effects sucked. And and and.
These don't make you productive, and they don't even make you happier unless you remember to appreciate them.
Which is why I'm taking the time to write this comment. I just had another amazing day that my older self simply couldn't imagine, let alone someone from mid-century or before computers.
The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Your average web based word processor with cloud storage performs about the same as Microsoft Word did on Windows 3.1 on a 486 saving onto a floppy. Screens are bigger, resolutions are bigger, but the content is largely the same because the limit is human perception not technology.
If you actually keep things simple, you can build absolutely ridiculous things off modern hardware. I'm running an Internet search engine out of my living room. You could not that 20 years ago. What makes it possible is modern SSDs and the absolutely mind-boggling computing power of modern CPU.
> if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s?
Yes. Even the cheapest house built to code will be noticeably better than one from 1980s. The quality of materials, technology of materials, wiring, plumbing, flooring, insulation, etc will all be better.
> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet
Not true, for similar reasons as above. Name a 2022 Corolla equivalent that could be purchased in the 1980s, safety, fuel efficiency, and reliability wise, at a similar inflation adjusted price. No 1980s car will even come close, and that is just for the most basic car today.
I mostly agree, though I think there are differences you'd notice rather quickly (but nothing as big as moving from 1890 to 1950)
If you removed all the screens you'd probably first notice what's missing as opposed to what's different. In many of today's homes you wouldn't see things like tape / record players, stereos, VCRs, telephones, books, maps, yellow pages, rolodexes, calendars - all of these having a digital replacement.
And depending on the affluence of the home you'd notice a lot more variety of specialty things - for example kitchen equipment (espresso machines, burr coffee grinders, instant pots, sous vide machines, mini blow torches, automatic ice cream makers). There are thousands of available board games now compared to the 80s - and it is super easy to have specialty hobby items as they're cheap and readily available. If you went to the grocery store you'd see a far greater variety of vegetables, prepared foods, cheeses, meats, "exotic" ingredients etc.
I think the big differences are around convenience, variety, and availability - and for whatever reason they don't feel quite as big, even though the work that goes into making that possible is astoundingly large and complex.
This looks and feels like the Office I use everyday.
Likewise, I feel like the changes in the realm of software development, a purportedly fast moving, tech and investment heavy industry, have been a mix of sidegrades, new paradigms enabled by faster hardware, and just stuff as it ever was before.
If a 2005 programmer, who knew C++,JavaScript,Java,HTML,C#,Python,Bash etc. would have been frozen and thawed yesterday, would be able to be brought up to speed on modern iterations of technology and tooling.
Growing up in the 2000s, I hung out on internet forums instead of Reddit, chatted with people on IRC instead of Discord, and used MSN messenger instead of Whatsapp, but these programs almost served the same social purpose.
Considering video games, a canary in the coal mine for the bleeding edge in software and hardware (at least it used to be that way), one could be forgiven for mistaking Crysis, a 2007 game for one that came out yesterday. Halo Infinite released just last year, with almost identical gameplay to the original 2001 Halo.
I feel like the pace of improvement has slowed considerably starting with the 2000s, and I'd be hard pressed to point out anything life-changing that came out in the last decade.
Exactly. Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth spells out the details of what real innovation looks like. Peter Drucker used to make about the same point, putting the emphasis on the 60 years leading up to 1914, which he considered the most innovative 60 years in human history: photography, telephones, radio, electricity, the combustion engine and therefore cars and trucks, airplanes, the modern textile dye industry, the oil industry, the first plastics, mass production of cleaning solutions, sulfa drugs, the modern steel industry and therefore cheap steel, and therefore skyscrapers and larger boats, the wholesale reinvention of mathematics starting with group theory discovered or re-discovered from Gauss in the 1870s and then followed by the evolution towards set theory, not to mention the tensor calculus, Boolean logic, and statistics becoming part of science, Max Plank but also Albert Einstein, etc. The list is really too long.
At a slightly larger scale, there was what some historians refer to as a "secular boom" from the 1700s to the 1970s, and then since the 1970s we've seen the onset of what some call The Great Stagnation.
How this ends and what comes next is anyone's guess.
The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet
Except we now have cars with self-driving (however limited, it's a massive improvement over a car from 30 years).
Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet, a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other?
I would absolutely choose a mobile phone over any of those things.
How do I tell I am not in the 80's. I just requested a repeat prescription in 30 seconds, requested a pizza in 60 seconds, purchased some stock in 60 seconds, paid a trades-person in 30 seconds. I can buy stuff at any shop (99.9%) around here without my wallet. I haven't spoken to someone at a bank branch for years. I don't have something ... I can order it online and get it the next day. I can have access to courses that are 10 times better than $2000 week long in-person courses of the 90s, for free or little money. Where does it end...?
If we are measuring by using dollars, well that's silly. We could have $100TN or whatever of tokens in circulation and be living like wild animals or colonizing the solar system.
> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet
I grew up in the late 2000s driving manual cars in France. My electric Hyundai Kona is a wildly better experience by a lot. It accelerates easily, corrects my mistakes with emergency braking / lane centering, and it's stupid easy to park or start on a hill with it.
Try 1960 surgery sometime. Or 1960 chemo, or cardio imaging, if you’re really unlucky. Or 1960 airfares or jet engines. Or 1960 machine shop equipment.
The last 30 years? I can exhaustively research a technical subject at home, without getting dressed, thanks to that Russian lady. My Google Drive has a departmental library, suitable for the old Bell Labs, of books on lasers and optics. A CAD (design) and CAM (send machine instructions to a tool) program that was utterly unavailable, with attempts at this in Fortune 50 companies and the DOD, is FREE, with rotatable shaded solid models, FEA tools, and support for hundreds of machines. GPS in a strange area? Cheap expresso makers at home? Adjust your air conditioner from 3000 miles away with your phone? Take studio quality pictures with it? Servomotors and ballscrews on tools now cheaper the gear trains and lead screws they replace? Measure a whole room with a cheap handheld thingy?
Personal computers have become a distraction, like TV sets. People watching TV are generally not very productive.1 Before the internet we referred to TV as "the opiate of the masses".2 Not only do we now have a worse figurative opiate than TV in the form of today's www,3 we have the legalisation of literal opiates for the masses thanks to Purdue Pharma.
1
A plaintiff's lawyer specialising in class action securities fraud litigation might be one exception. He might be watching CNBC and drafting a new complaint at the same time. :)
"The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!"
I am still using original netcat every day to deal with the dismal kludges band-aided together, now run by pinheads. Although I use scripts I write myself instead of those of the author, netcat's simplicity, portability and reliability over 26 years is one of the few things I still enjoy about the www. In the rare chance he still uses the www and reads HN, thank you Mr Walker for one of the best programs ever written, not to mention the entertaining source code comments.
In 1960, you either had to have cash or find a place that took a check to make purchases. Maybe some places took a credit card. Ever have to wait in line behind someone that is writing a check? "Productive" won't come to mind.
To get that cash you had to walk into a bank during banking hours. Then we got ATMs and could get our money any time of day. No more cutting out of work to deposit that royalty check.
More places started taking cards as well as cash. I distinctly remember asking businesses if they took cards _before_ making a purchase. We still had holdouts like restaurants that didn't split the check.
Now look at 2010. Pay with cash/check/card. Wait a few more years and you can do this with your phone. Get your meal tab split however you like. Owe someone money? No more writing checks, going to the ATM, just hit up Venmo.
Now, what's the productivity measure in that? I have no idea.
> Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.
50 years ago, the average person did not cross the Atlantic at all. Flights were so expensive they were completely inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
Today, most of the middle class can eventually afford a European vacation, if it's something they want to prioritize. I'm not rich and I've been to Europe three times in my life.
The way in which we travel is also significantly safer and more efficient. For as much as I hate airports and airlines, I can't deny that the state of things today is still at least an order of magnitude better than "decades ago".
I agree, instead of critiqueing and truly reflecting on what went wrong, and what to do to fix it; technologists are obsessed with over-praising of how things have gotten better. It misses the point that "We could have done a lot better" if we weren't so stagnant.
America was a powerhouse of innovation in 1950-1970 both in private and public sectors. The progress was impossibly exponential.
First step is admission of failure. Even the valid praise that "World of bits has seen tremendous innovation" should be followed by "Why did it not progress even faster and why is there so much malaise in the world of bits (ad tech)?"
But give it up. You tried but you can't explain that argument in a few paragraphs in a social network. That's a level of intelligence that is simply not possible here.
Just look at the answers you got. You (and Gordon) talk about changes in the fundamental, in the daily routines of everyday life, in the organization of life, cities and markets. However almost all answers here completely miss that point and go: "but product X is so much better now!".
> Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.
Innovation is driven by demand, and demand for faster travel times is mainly fueled by people wanting quicker business trips, not people on holidays.
Demand for business trips has waned dramatically due to the meteoric rise of video-conferencing. So businesses are spending less less time and money sending humans traveling around the world, which has had undeniable gains of productivity in businesses.
Well yes, because we have solar panels and heat pumps and battery powered power tools and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and microwave ovens and smart lights and ...
I find this statement absolutely insane. We’ve made huge progress on just about every facet of life I can think of and continue to. It’s cool some guy wrote a book on it but it’s a pretty narrow and contrived view of the world.
> Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet, a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other? I think it really puts into perspective how much or rather little value those 'innovations' add.
Exactly! In fact I‘d go further and say - in some cases - “innovation” has made things worse not better.
As a kid our family TV had one remote control. You switched the TV on and it “just worked”. Today to watch your “Smart TV” you need at least 3 remote controls apparently and the time between switching it on an actually watching anything seems to get longer and longer. Sure there’s all this choice now available of what to watch - although mostly it’s a choice between many variations of low quality content - but the basic usability of a TV is way worse than what I had when I was 10.
Another example is “smart lights” … it used to be you just switch a light on and it worked. But now there’s at least an additional 200 ms to wait for a light to turn on, and a little glimmer of anxiety when you’re unsure what “mode” the light will boot up in, especially when your Wifi was down…
I do a comedy podcast and we were ranting about this stuff a little while ago about how “innovation” is making things worse https://youtu.be/HvtCfUMJEk0
I agree with your points, but software will enable revolutionary devices. I think my dream robot butler that will clean my house, iron my clothes, prepare food based on grand chef recipes, take deliveries and repaint the walls while I am not around is just around the corner. This is mostly a software problem. In the military space software is what is making the difference in ukraine: drones, self guided missiles, intelligence. Then you have self driving cars.
As an office worker, I’d stay what is capping productivity right now is actually not good enough software. Too many manual processes done by hand, copy-pasting in excel. It is still too slow and expensive to develop software to do automation and those things are still too damn complex for business users to automate it themselves.
But in that space the gains of productivity have been massive. MS Outlook has eliminated the job of a secretary. Remember the armies of accountants computing financial reports. By cleaning up an old room on a trading floor I found a stack of blank paper trade tickets (printed in 1999…), you’d have a guy running between sales and traders and ops to get it signed off. Then ops people typing it. I read a book of a guy in the French secret service saying that his career consisted in compiling information about what paper people wrote, who knows who, and to know your way around that file so you could search it efficiently. This guy has been replaced by google and linkedin. The hours saved finding information immediately, saving you a trip to the library are countless. I think software has enabled huge productivity gains and there are more to come.
Technology is popularly misunderstood as "gadgets and lab science". But the root of the word is shared with technique.
That is, if I have a technique for applying leverage, and I use it to make a lever, that's a simple technology. If I define a new system of organizing my home according to some principles, that's a technology. And so on.
It is certainly the case that we have found new techniques and technologies in recent decades. But in defining a "tech sector" and relating it to measurements of GDP growth we have tokenized a particular mode of it, one which some parts of society propose is increasingly irrelevant to the quality of our existence. It's often pointed out that wars are "good for the economy" in that more stuff is manufactured, overlooking the destructive aspects of war.
And so the definition of productivity is also worth questioning, because it's tied to a model of society based around the firm and its capacity to produce quantities of assets and trade them for money. This model has been in place for a few hundred years now(see early merchantalist writing) and is in need of reassessment. Much of what the economy has done since the beginning of industrialization is simply in the realm of creating more monetizable spaces and optimizing towards the "frictionless" everything-for-sale optimum.
It worked for a while, but at this point, we're basically hindered by the frameworks used to define value and enforce sale. There are huge realms of technical innovations that don't get explored because we don't have a place for them. Instead we have to aim to "fit in" with the legacy system.
Manafacturing productivity is though the roof. PCBs are incredibly cheap now, and lead times are in days. Micros that can do almost anything, bristling with peripherals and programmable in C or even just running Linux, rather than hand assembly or discrete circuits. Dedicated devices that cost cents handle tasks that used to take organisations months and months to design. All sorts of materials make things that used to be impossible routine. Machine control of all sorts is mind-blowing in precision, reliability and speed. You can get things lasered, printed, sintered, cast, moulded, routed, milled, waterjetted, EDMed, whatever, at prices and turnarounds that would have been complete fantasy in the past.
I was thinking something similar (if narrower). In my universe (embedded systems), we have entire BLE stacks-in-a-box shipped to us by manufacturers now. That would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. Now more than ever, peripherals can be interconnected using a little bit-twiddling, automating a lot of the system logic that would have been handled explicitly in the past.
To be fair, none of that matters if we aren't actually doing useful things with the fancy microcontrollers.
One thing I don't see mentioned often is that productivity in software development has skyrocketed, but it's hard to appreciate. Today's services are much more sophisticated and complex than just a decade ago. Even if some of that complexity is incidental and undesirable, it's undeniable that today a small team can pump out a much more refined app that entire companies did back then.
This isn't only guess work, here is a real example: when I joined my first shop we had 2 sysadmin working full time to maintain a couple dozen servers. Over time they started introducing virtualization, automation, devops... by the end of my 7 year tenure, we had 250+ servers and only one sysadmin part time working on them. That's between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude improvement, and my company wasn't special by any means.
Yes, but a person can write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word. How many millions of dev-hours have been expended on stuff that fundamentally doesn't do anything new?
Edit: saying they don't do anything new isn't right. They do, especially with regards to collaboration. What I really mean is that they don't make the essential task -- the actual writing -- much easier. That's still human/mental work. Once you have come up with the words, putting the words into a document is the easy part.
You could also less charitably read that "growth" as using 250 servers to do the same job you previously did with two. I guess that's growth for sever manufacturers, but I'd expect with more powerful hardware we'd need fewer servers, rather than more.
I'm genuinely curious about this, and would like to see some data. When I started coding professionally the LAMP stack was the go-to, and your program would generally just do all the "work" in the context of a web request and then render an HTML page in response.
Now, the systems are much more complex for sure (queues and asynchronous processing, event buses, microservices, multiple databases for different purposes) but I'm not sure that (functionality provided to business) / (number of developers) has increased all that much.
Of course I could be dealing with a bias because as a novice programmer I worked on simpler programs and now I work on more complex / powerful programs.
We had one frontend engineer in the 80s/90s doing TP and Delphi frontends, and he was also doing some backend work because frontend work was very easy and fast. We now have 10 frontend devs and I don’t find it an improvement. It looks somewhat better sometimes, but it’s slower, more inconsistent (you can jump from 1 of the 100s of applications we did in Delphi to a random other and immediately understand it all if you use Windows) and incredibly costly compared.
Today's services are indeed much more sophisticated, but not necessarily better. This is because better and cheaper hardware made people sloppy, not because we have much better services.
I was rather disappointed in Lohr (author of this piece) as he is smart and was around in the 1990s for Solow’s famous quip “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”.
In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a flop (especially in the US’s then-backwards wireless environment). It takes time for people to understand a new capability and for it to reach the point where it’s worth ditching current practice. My aging parents still like to have a meeting (with their lawyer for example) that could have been a phone call or even email; they still visit the bank in person etc. I can’t be bothered with any of that.
The call center makes a good example: I have seen a company that uses machine learning to make the outbound call: it can wait patiently on hold and even do some transactions with the human in the call center. Things like that don’t show up in the stats yet; the real change will be replacing most of the call center ppl with an API, and with the humans there to handle the really hard problems.
The right side of the bell curve can now program an application worth many dollars per month and zero marginal reproduction costs. The left side of the bell curve is incapable of extending these technologies but increasingly consumes them due to their low cost. This can explain the seemingly paradoxical phenomena of the rich becoming fabulously richer, wage growth stagnating on average, and productivity barely improving. The inventions of the last 50 years were of smart people for smart people. We wanted flying cars on Mars, we ended up exchanging Amazon warehouse jobs for free TikTok.
Speak for yourself. I feel like I have riches of new tech at my disposal.
Currently have 10 gbs fiber internet for $45/month, in one second I can download the contents of my first hard drive. My laptop has 64gb of ram and 8tb of ssd. I don't even know what to do with that much compute as I mostly use Emacs and Firefox for everything. Meetings are completely online, so I no longer need to travel to visit other offices to exchange data.
My phone is an embarrassment of riches, it covers most of my digital needs (music, hd video, note taking, internet, email, etc.) but is mostly ignored because it's really just a distraction.
In the garage, a tig welder, cnc mill, vacuum casting table, burn out kiln and countless other tools. Due to the previously mentioned internet connection I can watch videos that teach me how to use all of this equipment. Most of the software to run the CNC mill, do CAD design or CAM is all open source and free.
I can also purchase solar panels, heat pumps, lithium iron phosphate battery banks for ridiculously low costs compared to what I would have had to spend back in the 90s when I first wanted to get off the grid.
All in all, it's all there for us to live the solar punk lifestyle we've all wanted...just takes doing it.
I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly line workers to do the job of a single robot?
No, we are more productive than ever before. But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich, which is why we live in one of the most unequal times since the gilded age. I hate this term but I honestly think it's just "FUD" put out by these uber-rich people, this sentiment of "oh the economy isn't becoming more productive". It is most definitely becoming more productive, but the only benefit Joe Average sees from that is slightly lower consumer prices (which of course is offset by skyrocketing asset prices).
IIRC the only way society got out of this gini-out-of-the-bottle situation last time was through multiple cataclysmic wars, a great depression, and trust busting, so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned.
what is the definition of productive? In 1985 I had a one month $1200 phone bill (well, the bill was to my dad) from calling my girlfriend on the other side of the country. I wrote letters to her on paper and sent them via snail mail.
Today I video chat and play network games with my friend's 7yr old son 8000 kilometers away.
In that same time I had an Atari 1200XL and it took several minutes to run the assembler to cross compile the C64 game I was working on. Today I can do far more impressive things from any browser just using jsfiddle/codepen and things run instantly.
Today I can make music in Garageband, Ableton, and all the alternatives in minutes. In the mid 80s my dad had to use a 4 track reel-to-reel with overdub and he had to be able to actually play all the instruments.
Today I can grab blender/resolve/fusion and compete with almost any TV show on quality and broadcast my stuff for free on youtube. Vs in the 80s/90s when that would have taking a huge team of people and $$$$$$$$ in equipment plus access to either retail and VHS copies or access to broadcast gate keepers.
Unreal/Unity have vastly increased productivity in games. Just go to any gamejam and look at how far people used to their tools can get in 2 days vs what they could make in the same amount of time in the mid-80s. Or look at the explosion of games on places like itch.io.
Even typing documents. Typing in this textarea in HN is way easier than typing was on my Atari 800 in Atariwriter and the moment I press "add comment" it's published for all to see. Same with twitter/facebook/google docs/blogger/wordpress. Consider how much work and how many people it would have taking to do anything similar in the 80s. Write document, typeset document, get printer to print 1000s of copies, mail them to people, have mail people carry and deliver them....
Contacting people in general and being able to send them documents, photos, videos, is free and trival today. Would have taken 10s of people and days to weeks just 40 yrs ago.
Maybe "jobs" in general have not but lots of things have gotten incredibly easy, raising what is possible to produce (in otherwords, be productive)
Have a look at our GDP per capita graph and tell me again we're not more productive. We're working less and less and making more and more. Some of it is commercial and social innovation, but a lot is technology as well.
I work as a specific type of tech consultant to medium-sized companies, and it's wondrous to behold how easy we can make many aspects of business. Critical functions that took multiple handshakes, paper mail, multiple mistakes, and at least a week now take pre-arranged agreements, API's, and they happen in maybe two seconds, almost always perfectly, and before anybody even realizes.
I literally don't even want to use a computer at all. I want a cheap powerful rototiller, and an herbicide that only targets bamboo, and a robot laser to zap snails and cabbage moths in my garden. But here I am like a schmuck putting out little bottle tops of beer for the snails to drown in, running around like a doofus with a butterfly net to catch moths, and breaking my back to dig up 2-foot-deep bamboo roots over 2 acres.
Fuck modern technology. I don't want to sit in front of a screen. I want to live life in the real world. Give me solutions to my problems, not distractions from them.
There is an infamous anecdote from the turn/mid of the 20th century:
People believed that innovations in vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc would cause people to have more leisure time because of how much time it saved in cleaning.
But it didn't happen. Why?
Because people's expectations for hygiene and cleanliness went up. And as it became easier to clean houses and clothes, people were more comfortable with having larger houses, and more clothes.
Technology innovation is much the same way. As capabilities increase so do expectations. And the "economy" is all about expectations and aspirations.
New technology is very obviously making us more productive in several different ways - the metric in the article is just wrong. I'm going to pick on something that people in the thread haven't mentioned that much: Logistics and online infrastructure.
I get every kind of thing possible delivered right to my door and this is made possible by improvements in logistics. Not having to spend my time going out shopping for these things gives me time which I can spend productively or on recreation at my option.
1) Medicine: When in the 80s or 90s if I needed medicine I would need to wait for a doctor's appointment, get a prescription, wait at the pharmacy to collect, now my doctor knows when I need a repeat, sends it electronically to my pharmacy and it's ready when I arrive (or I could have it delivered).
2) Groceries and household goods: Everyone from Amazon down to my local deli and bakery has a website where I can request goods, pay online and have them delivered within days or sometimes even same day. This wasn't possible in the 80s at the scale we have today. You had to shop in person or some companies used to have paper catalogues where you had to send in a form to order, wait days or weeks for goods to arrive. Not only that but repeat/subscription orders were extremely limited. Now I have repeat orders for everything from my dog's food to my razor blades. THings which were subscription services in the 80s are still available but have a much wider selection.
3) Services: Lots of "in person" services can now be delivered by video. My wife and lots of friends are professional musicians. In spite of the pandemic they were able to continue teaching over zoom. Their productivity would literally have been zero during the lockdowns as they would not have been able to work at all were it not for new technology. Likewise things like video consultations allow people access to doctors etc without the time that would otherwise be wasted on travel etc to get to the appointment.
We are more productive. We are doing more with less people. It doesn’t seem like we are more productive because most people are overworked which creates an illusion of unproductivity. Most of those jobs that were lost in 2008-2009 were never replaced, everyone left just had to pick up the slack which tech helped facilitate
The other aspect is that a lot of our tech is vapid entertainment. As buzz aldrin said, “They promised me mars colonies. All we got was Facebook” or something along those lines.
What "new technology" are we talking about exactly?
Because new technology as in better robots, better medical/agricultural/transportation technology, better network tech, better electronics, more efficient power generation technology, faster chips, improved algorithms for things like logistics etc. etc. HAVE made us much more productive.
The problem is, as with almost all developments that actually matter for our progress as a species, these things kinda fly under the radar. They just work in the background, keeping the ship afloat. They usually don't get big shiny sparkly stage presentations. They are, simultaneously, the most important things happening to our technological and scientific progress, and the most ignored.
Another poster compared 1890 to 1950 - jumping from one to the other would be obviously shocking, from 1960 - 2020 perhaps less-so, physically.
Still, I find it amazing that in 2022, I:
- Work from home via the internet with people I've never met
- Visit places I've never been in simulated 3D to build familiarity
- Receive exact routes to virtually anywhere from a computer in my pocket
- Video call with my family in real-time literally from one side of the planet to another.
- Have Copilot autocompleting repetitive lines of code for me with (ok, 60% - 70% of the time..) incredible prescience
- Get real-time translation of foreign text from a printed page
Those are just some of the the most common examples from my daily life. The productivity gains are real, at least for me personally.
Productivity has grown! But not for everyone, sadly.
Some people are now magnitudes more productive than they were before. But that requires an understanding of technology, and a drive for improving tools, process, and themselves. The people who can do this effectively are reaping the productivity benefits.
Sadly, not everyone is. Some people don't want to do it. Many don't have access to the the instruction that would allow them to unlock these productivity gains. Many productivity tools continue to suffer from usability issues, which limit who can harness them.
I'm an optimist. The past has show that eventually, most people can benefit from productivity gains. It takes time for tools to become easy enough for the majority to benefit from them. It's happening all around us.
Per the article, productivity has been growing at 1% a year for the past decade, compared to 3% in the decades prior. So the headline is misleading, technology is making us more productive, just not at the same rate as in the years before.
The author claims this is worrisome, but his reasoning seems flawed to me:
> a less productive economy is a smaller one with fewer resources to deal with social challenges like inequality
But again, we are not getting “less productive”, it’s the increase in productivity that’s getting slower.
The author then presumably wants to make us as productive as possible as soon as possible to solve this particular issue. His preferred candidate for this seems to be AI. The remainder of the article essentially an ad for advances in that specific technology.
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one case you're going to see skyscrapers, commercial airplanes, nuclear power plants, electricity everywhere, cars going at amazing speeds. In the latter case what's the difference, people paying with their phones and different fashion mostly.
'Innovation' in the internet age, say the last 30 years has mostly been limited to enable hedonistic digital consumption with very little impact on how we fundamentally move through the world. The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet. A 100 years ago to 50 years ago meant going from horse carriages to trains and from weeks on a ship to hours on a plane. Today the average person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.
That's why productivity growth is low, the world hasn't changed that much. There's still marginal improvements obviously which do add up over time but the 'unprecedent pace of innovation' you hear about from tech evangelists is nowhere.
Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet, a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other? I think it really puts into perspective how much or rather little value those 'innovations' add.
[+] [-] Quinner|3 years ago|reply
One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look around for reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing cabinets. If you wanted to know more about something, you probably had to go to a library, which might not even have a book on the topic (maybe if you were particularly determined to know the answer you'd wait a few weeks for an ILL).
Its a bit sad to me that you look at this enormous sea change in how we interact with the world and see Angry Birds.
[+] [-] asah|3 years ago|reply
- cellphones, the internet and GPS saves insane amounts of time coordinating RL events. I'm never gonna get back the 1000+ hours I spent with paper maps trying to find places, playing "phone tag" coordinating activities, etc. Kids these days, they just have no idea.
- remote work & learning = 2+ hours PER DAY. I used to pay $500 (in today-dollars) a month to sit on the Long Island Railroad and read books. Now I work when I'm ready to be productive. I listen-in on zoom calls, whisper questions to people, read docs, all "soaking up" information. Recently, I got tons of work done while on a grand jury - 21 cases in 8 days and no problem interleaving work, thanks to excellent WiFi and work-from-anywhere.
- e-commerce and youtube = no more repeated trips to the store for stupid shit. I've got a dozen major home improvement projects going at once, with ecomm orders every which way, from lumber to jigsaws, electrical to plumbing. Easy returns means I can experiment more. YouTube means fewer mistakes and far fewer disasters.
- globalization = variety = better tools for the job. No seriously, you have no idea how limited and shitty products used to be. In software, we had no source control let alone CI/CD - reproducibility was not a thing, let alone distributed computing. IRL, I remember trying to buy stuff at Sears and Service Merchandise and the only review system was the store clerk on commission. You can't imagine the BS we put up with, simply for a lack of variety.
(I could go on... you can't imagine healthcare back then... in the starkest definition of "productivity," cancer was often a death sentence even caught early, and now people routine survive stage 4 cancers... also everybody knew people who died young in car accidents, it was tragic but normalized, and then DUI laws and education, crumple zones and airbags all made this rare...)
Now it's true, we "waste" our newfound freedoms binge-watching Netflix, wasting time here on HN, going to the gym, and so on. Put another way, I dunno about you, but my daily/weekly "productivity limit" is not based on output, but on my brain maxxing out, from too many projects, too many names, too many details.
It's also true that many upgrades are "trivial" - vacuums with lights and on/off buttons on the handle; better quality audio and video; 1000s of streaming shows. Back in the day, we had maybe a dozen channels and the quality was often terrible, from mediocre writing and acting, to hilariously simple production values that even pre-dated the demands of 4K. Historical fiction wasn't popular because it sucked. Sci-fi and horror weren't much of a thing because the special effects sucked. And and and.
These don't make you productive, and they don't even make you happier unless you remember to appreciate them.
Which is why I'm taking the time to write this comment. I just had another amazing day that my older self simply couldn't imagine, let alone someone from mid-century or before computers.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps. Your average web based word processor with cloud storage performs about the same as Microsoft Word did on Windows 3.1 on a 486 saving onto a floppy. Screens are bigger, resolutions are bigger, but the content is largely the same because the limit is human perception not technology.
If you actually keep things simple, you can build absolutely ridiculous things off modern hardware. I'm running an Internet search engine out of my living room. You could not that 20 years ago. What makes it possible is modern SSDs and the absolutely mind-boggling computing power of modern CPU.
[+] [-] humanistbot|3 years ago|reply
> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.
Energy efficiency and fuel economy have made massive gains. Materials are stronger and lighter. Batteries last ages compared to 30 years ago.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|3 years ago|reply
Yes. Even the cheapest house built to code will be noticeably better than one from 1980s. The quality of materials, technology of materials, wiring, plumbing, flooring, insulation, etc will all be better.
> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet
Not true, for similar reasons as above. Name a 2022 Corolla equivalent that could be purchased in the 1980s, safety, fuel efficiency, and reliability wise, at a similar inflation adjusted price. No 1980s car will even come close, and that is just for the most basic car today.
[+] [-] acjacobson|3 years ago|reply
If you removed all the screens you'd probably first notice what's missing as opposed to what's different. In many of today's homes you wouldn't see things like tape / record players, stereos, VCRs, telephones, books, maps, yellow pages, rolodexes, calendars - all of these having a digital replacement.
And depending on the affluence of the home you'd notice a lot more variety of specialty things - for example kitchen equipment (espresso machines, burr coffee grinders, instant pots, sous vide machines, mini blow torches, automatic ice cream makers). There are thousands of available board games now compared to the 80s - and it is super easy to have specialty hobby items as they're cheap and readily available. If you went to the grocery store you'd see a far greater variety of vegetables, prepared foods, cheeses, meats, "exotic" ingredients etc.
I think the big differences are around convenience, variety, and availability - and for whatever reason they don't feel quite as big, even though the work that goes into making that possible is astoundingly large and complex.
[+] [-] torginus|3 years ago|reply
I just watched this video of Office 3.0 from 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsTydF09hbg
This looks and feels like the Office I use everyday.
Likewise, I feel like the changes in the realm of software development, a purportedly fast moving, tech and investment heavy industry, have been a mix of sidegrades, new paradigms enabled by faster hardware, and just stuff as it ever was before.
If a 2005 programmer, who knew C++,JavaScript,Java,HTML,C#,Python,Bash etc. would have been frozen and thawed yesterday, would be able to be brought up to speed on modern iterations of technology and tooling.
Growing up in the 2000s, I hung out on internet forums instead of Reddit, chatted with people on IRC instead of Discord, and used MSN messenger instead of Whatsapp, but these programs almost served the same social purpose.
Considering video games, a canary in the coal mine for the bleeding edge in software and hardware (at least it used to be that way), one could be forgiven for mistaking Crysis, a 2007 game for one that came out yesterday. Halo Infinite released just last year, with almost identical gameplay to the original 2001 Halo.
I feel like the pace of improvement has slowed considerably starting with the 2000s, and I'd be hard pressed to point out anything life-changing that came out in the last decade.
[+] [-] lkrubner|3 years ago|reply
At a slightly larger scale, there was what some historians refer to as a "secular boom" from the 1700s to the 1970s, and then since the 1970s we've seen the onset of what some call The Great Stagnation.
How this ends and what comes next is anyone's guess.
[+] [-] andreilys|3 years ago|reply
Except we now have cars with self-driving (however limited, it's a massive improvement over a car from 30 years).
Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet, a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other?
I would absolutely choose a mobile phone over any of those things.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|3 years ago|reply
If we are measuring by using dollars, well that's silly. We could have $100TN or whatever of tokens in circulation and be living like wild animals or colonizing the solar system.
[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|3 years ago|reply
I grew up in the late 2000s driving manual cars in France. My electric Hyundai Kona is a wildly better experience by a lot. It accelerates easily, corrects my mistakes with emergency braking / lane centering, and it's stupid easy to park or start on a hill with it.
[+] [-] aj7|3 years ago|reply
OK I’ll shut up.
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|3 years ago|reply
1 A plaintiff's lawyer specialising in class action securities fraud litigation might be one exception. He might be watching CNBC and drafting a new complaint at the same time. :)
2 https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,809673...
3 Circa 1996 https://github.com/mikemurr/nc110/blob/master/scripts/web
"The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!"
I am still using original netcat every day to deal with the dismal kludges band-aided together, now run by pinheads. Although I use scripts I write myself instead of those of the author, netcat's simplicity, portability and reliability over 26 years is one of the few things I still enjoy about the www. In the rare chance he still uses the www and reads HN, thank you Mr Walker for one of the best programs ever written, not to mention the entertaining source code comments.
[+] [-] dockd|3 years ago|reply
In 1960, you either had to have cash or find a place that took a check to make purchases. Maybe some places took a credit card. Ever have to wait in line behind someone that is writing a check? "Productive" won't come to mind.
To get that cash you had to walk into a bank during banking hours. Then we got ATMs and could get our money any time of day. No more cutting out of work to deposit that royalty check.
More places started taking cards as well as cash. I distinctly remember asking businesses if they took cards _before_ making a purchase. We still had holdouts like restaurants that didn't split the check.
Now look at 2010. Pay with cash/check/card. Wait a few more years and you can do this with your phone. Get your meal tab split however you like. Owe someone money? No more writing checks, going to the ATM, just hit up Venmo.
Now, what's the productivity measure in that? I have no idea.
[+] [-] moron4hire|3 years ago|reply
50 years ago, the average person did not cross the Atlantic at all. Flights were so expensive they were completely inaccessible to the vast majority of people.
Today, most of the middle class can eventually afford a European vacation, if it's something they want to prioritize. I'm not rich and I've been to Europe three times in my life.
The way in which we travel is also significantly safer and more efficient. For as much as I hate airports and airlines, I can't deny that the state of things today is still at least an order of magnitude better than "decades ago".
[+] [-] systemvoltage|3 years ago|reply
America was a powerhouse of innovation in 1950-1970 both in private and public sectors. The progress was impossibly exponential.
First step is admission of failure. Even the valid praise that "World of bits has seen tremendous innovation" should be followed by "Why did it not progress even faster and why is there so much malaise in the world of bits (ad tech)?"
[+] [-] diego_moita|3 years ago|reply
A fantastic book!
But give it up. You tried but you can't explain that argument in a few paragraphs in a social network. That's a level of intelligence that is simply not possible here.
Just look at the answers you got. You (and Gordon) talk about changes in the fundamental, in the daily routines of everyday life, in the organization of life, cities and markets. However almost all answers here completely miss that point and go: "but product X is so much better now!".
They'd need to read Gordon's book to grasp it.
[+] [-] damon_c|3 years ago|reply
Sure, the rich people of the 60s had cars and dishwashers. Now many more millions of people do.
[+] [-] gitgud|3 years ago|reply
Innovation is driven by demand, and demand for faster travel times is mainly fueled by people wanting quicker business trips, not people on holidays.
Demand for business trips has waned dramatically due to the meteoric rise of video-conferencing. So businesses are spending less less time and money sending humans traveling around the world, which has had undeniable gains of productivity in businesses.
[+] [-] IshKebab|3 years ago|reply
Well yes, because we have solar panels and heat pumps and battery powered power tools and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and microwave ovens and smart lights and ...
You wouldn't expect walls and carpets to change.
[+] [-] mountainriver|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryf|3 years ago|reply
Exactly! In fact I‘d go further and say - in some cases - “innovation” has made things worse not better.
As a kid our family TV had one remote control. You switched the TV on and it “just worked”. Today to watch your “Smart TV” you need at least 3 remote controls apparently and the time between switching it on an actually watching anything seems to get longer and longer. Sure there’s all this choice now available of what to watch - although mostly it’s a choice between many variations of low quality content - but the basic usability of a TV is way worse than what I had when I was 10.
Another example is “smart lights” … it used to be you just switch a light on and it worked. But now there’s at least an additional 200 ms to wait for a light to turn on, and a little glimmer of anxiety when you’re unsure what “mode” the light will boot up in, especially when your Wifi was down…
I do a comedy podcast and we were ranting about this stuff a little while ago about how “innovation” is making things worse https://youtu.be/HvtCfUMJEk0
[+] [-] cm2187|3 years ago|reply
As an office worker, I’d stay what is capping productivity right now is actually not good enough software. Too many manual processes done by hand, copy-pasting in excel. It is still too slow and expensive to develop software to do automation and those things are still too damn complex for business users to automate it themselves.
But in that space the gains of productivity have been massive. MS Outlook has eliminated the job of a secretary. Remember the armies of accountants computing financial reports. By cleaning up an old room on a trading floor I found a stack of blank paper trade tickets (printed in 1999…), you’d have a guy running between sales and traders and ops to get it signed off. Then ops people typing it. I read a book of a guy in the French secret service saying that his career consisted in compiling information about what paper people wrote, who knows who, and to know your way around that file so you could search it efficiently. This guy has been replaced by google and linkedin. The hours saved finding information immediately, saving you a trip to the library are countless. I think software has enabled huge productivity gains and there are more to come.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] syntheweave|3 years ago|reply
That is, if I have a technique for applying leverage, and I use it to make a lever, that's a simple technology. If I define a new system of organizing my home according to some principles, that's a technology. And so on.
It is certainly the case that we have found new techniques and technologies in recent decades. But in defining a "tech sector" and relating it to measurements of GDP growth we have tokenized a particular mode of it, one which some parts of society propose is increasingly irrelevant to the quality of our existence. It's often pointed out that wars are "good for the economy" in that more stuff is manufactured, overlooking the destructive aspects of war.
And so the definition of productivity is also worth questioning, because it's tied to a model of society based around the firm and its capacity to produce quantities of assets and trade them for money. This model has been in place for a few hundred years now(see early merchantalist writing) and is in need of reassessment. Much of what the economy has done since the beginning of industrialization is simply in the realm of creating more monetizable spaces and optimizing towards the "frictionless" everything-for-sale optimum.
It worked for a while, but at this point, we're basically hindered by the frameworks used to define value and enforce sale. There are huge realms of technical innovations that don't get explored because we don't have a place for them. Instead we have to aim to "fit in" with the legacy system.
[+] [-] adhesive_wombat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryukoposting|3 years ago|reply
To be fair, none of that matters if we aren't actually doing useful things with the fancy microcontrollers.
[+] [-] angarg12|3 years ago|reply
This isn't only guess work, here is a real example: when I joined my first shop we had 2 sysadmin working full time to maintain a couple dozen servers. Over time they started introducing virtualization, automation, devops... by the end of my 7 year tenure, we had 250+ servers and only one sysadmin part time working on them. That's between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude improvement, and my company wasn't special by any means.
[+] [-] SoftTalker|3 years ago|reply
Edit: saying they don't do anything new isn't right. They do, especially with regards to collaboration. What I really mean is that they don't make the essential task -- the actual writing -- much easier. That's still human/mental work. Once you have come up with the words, putting the words into a document is the easy part.
[+] [-] marginalia_nu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kareemsabri|3 years ago|reply
Now, the systems are much more complex for sure (queues and asynchronous processing, event buses, microservices, multiple databases for different purposes) but I'm not sure that (functionality provided to business) / (number of developers) has increased all that much.
Of course I could be dealing with a bias because as a novice programmer I worked on simpler programs and now I work on more complex / powerful programs.
[+] [-] tluyben2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alaricus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|3 years ago|reply
In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a flop (especially in the US’s then-backwards wireless environment). It takes time for people to understand a new capability and for it to reach the point where it’s worth ditching current practice. My aging parents still like to have a meeting (with their lawyer for example) that could have been a phone call or even email; they still visit the bank in person etc. I can’t be bothered with any of that.
The call center makes a good example: I have seen a company that uses machine learning to make the outbound call: it can wait patiently on hold and even do some transactions with the human in the call center. Things like that don’t show up in the stats yet; the real change will be replacing most of the call center ppl with an API, and with the humans there to handle the really hard problems.
[+] [-] ipnon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanomonkey|3 years ago|reply
Currently have 10 gbs fiber internet for $45/month, in one second I can download the contents of my first hard drive. My laptop has 64gb of ram and 8tb of ssd. I don't even know what to do with that much compute as I mostly use Emacs and Firefox for everything. Meetings are completely online, so I no longer need to travel to visit other offices to exchange data.
My phone is an embarrassment of riches, it covers most of my digital needs (music, hd video, note taking, internet, email, etc.) but is mostly ignored because it's really just a distraction.
In the garage, a tig welder, cnc mill, vacuum casting table, burn out kiln and countless other tools. Due to the previously mentioned internet connection I can watch videos that teach me how to use all of this equipment. Most of the software to run the CNC mill, do CAD design or CAM is all open source and free.
I can also purchase solar panels, heat pumps, lithium iron phosphate battery banks for ridiculously low costs compared to what I would have had to spend back in the 90s when I first wanted to get off the grid.
All in all, it's all there for us to live the solar punk lifestyle we've all wanted...just takes doing it.
[+] [-] uejfiweun|3 years ago|reply
No, we are more productive than ever before. But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich, which is why we live in one of the most unequal times since the gilded age. I hate this term but I honestly think it's just "FUD" put out by these uber-rich people, this sentiment of "oh the economy isn't becoming more productive". It is most definitely becoming more productive, but the only benefit Joe Average sees from that is slightly lower consumer prices (which of course is offset by skyrocketing asset prices).
IIRC the only way society got out of this gini-out-of-the-bottle situation last time was through multiple cataclysmic wars, a great depression, and trust busting, so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned.
[+] [-] greggman3|3 years ago|reply
Today I video chat and play network games with my friend's 7yr old son 8000 kilometers away.
In that same time I had an Atari 1200XL and it took several minutes to run the assembler to cross compile the C64 game I was working on. Today I can do far more impressive things from any browser just using jsfiddle/codepen and things run instantly.
Today I can make music in Garageband, Ableton, and all the alternatives in minutes. In the mid 80s my dad had to use a 4 track reel-to-reel with overdub and he had to be able to actually play all the instruments.
Today I can grab blender/resolve/fusion and compete with almost any TV show on quality and broadcast my stuff for free on youtube. Vs in the 80s/90s when that would have taking a huge team of people and $$$$$$$$ in equipment plus access to either retail and VHS copies or access to broadcast gate keepers.
Unreal/Unity have vastly increased productivity in games. Just go to any gamejam and look at how far people used to their tools can get in 2 days vs what they could make in the same amount of time in the mid-80s. Or look at the explosion of games on places like itch.io.
Even typing documents. Typing in this textarea in HN is way easier than typing was on my Atari 800 in Atariwriter and the moment I press "add comment" it's published for all to see. Same with twitter/facebook/google docs/blogger/wordpress. Consider how much work and how many people it would have taking to do anything similar in the 80s. Write document, typeset document, get printer to print 1000s of copies, mail them to people, have mail people carry and deliver them....
Contacting people in general and being able to send them documents, photos, videos, is free and trival today. Would have taken 10s of people and days to weeks just 40 yrs ago.
Maybe "jobs" in general have not but lots of things have gotten incredibly easy, raising what is possible to produce (in otherwords, be productive)
[+] [-] FredPret|3 years ago|reply
I work as a specific type of tech consultant to medium-sized companies, and it's wondrous to behold how easy we can make many aspects of business. Critical functions that took multiple handshakes, paper mail, multiple mistakes, and at least a week now take pre-arranged agreements, API's, and they happen in maybe two seconds, almost always perfectly, and before anybody even realizes.
[+] [-] throwaway892238|3 years ago|reply
Fuck modern technology. I don't want to sit in front of a screen. I want to live life in the real world. Give me solutions to my problems, not distractions from them.
[+] [-] deanCommie|3 years ago|reply
People believed that innovations in vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc would cause people to have more leisure time because of how much time it saved in cleaning.
But it didn't happen. Why?
Because people's expectations for hygiene and cleanliness went up. And as it became easier to clean houses and clothes, people were more comfortable with having larger houses, and more clothes.
Technology innovation is much the same way. As capabilities increase so do expectations. And the "economy" is all about expectations and aspirations.
[+] [-] neonate|3 years ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20220524170241/https://www.nytime...
[+] [-] seanhunter|3 years ago|reply
I get every kind of thing possible delivered right to my door and this is made possible by improvements in logistics. Not having to spend my time going out shopping for these things gives me time which I can spend productively or on recreation at my option.
1) Medicine: When in the 80s or 90s if I needed medicine I would need to wait for a doctor's appointment, get a prescription, wait at the pharmacy to collect, now my doctor knows when I need a repeat, sends it electronically to my pharmacy and it's ready when I arrive (or I could have it delivered).
2) Groceries and household goods: Everyone from Amazon down to my local deli and bakery has a website where I can request goods, pay online and have them delivered within days or sometimes even same day. This wasn't possible in the 80s at the scale we have today. You had to shop in person or some companies used to have paper catalogues where you had to send in a form to order, wait days or weeks for goods to arrive. Not only that but repeat/subscription orders were extremely limited. Now I have repeat orders for everything from my dog's food to my razor blades. THings which were subscription services in the 80s are still available but have a much wider selection.
3) Services: Lots of "in person" services can now be delivered by video. My wife and lots of friends are professional musicians. In spite of the pandemic they were able to continue teaching over zoom. Their productivity would literally have been zero during the lockdowns as they would not have been able to work at all were it not for new technology. Likewise things like video consultations allow people access to doctors etc without the time that would otherwise be wasted on travel etc to get to the appointment.
[+] [-] sudden_dystopia|3 years ago|reply
The other aspect is that a lot of our tech is vapid entertainment. As buzz aldrin said, “They promised me mars colonies. All we got was Facebook” or something along those lines.
[+] [-] usrbinbash|3 years ago|reply
Because new technology as in better robots, better medical/agricultural/transportation technology, better network tech, better electronics, more efficient power generation technology, faster chips, improved algorithms for things like logistics etc. etc. HAVE made us much more productive.
The problem is, as with almost all developments that actually matter for our progress as a species, these things kinda fly under the radar. They just work in the background, keeping the ship afloat. They usually don't get big shiny sparkly stage presentations. They are, simultaneously, the most important things happening to our technological and scientific progress, and the most ignored.
[+] [-] orcul|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobedawson|3 years ago|reply
Still, I find it amazing that in 2022, I:
- Work from home via the internet with people I've never met - Visit places I've never been in simulated 3D to build familiarity - Receive exact routes to virtually anywhere from a computer in my pocket - Video call with my family in real-time literally from one side of the planet to another. - Have Copilot autocompleting repetitive lines of code for me with (ok, 60% - 70% of the time..) incredible prescience - Get real-time translation of foreign text from a printed page
Those are just some of the the most common examples from my daily life. The productivity gains are real, at least for me personally.
[+] [-] koliber|3 years ago|reply
Some people are now magnitudes more productive than they were before. But that requires an understanding of technology, and a drive for improving tools, process, and themselves. The people who can do this effectively are reaping the productivity benefits.
Sadly, not everyone is. Some people don't want to do it. Many don't have access to the the instruction that would allow them to unlock these productivity gains. Many productivity tools continue to suffer from usability issues, which limit who can harness them.
I'm an optimist. The past has show that eventually, most people can benefit from productivity gains. It takes time for tools to become easy enough for the majority to benefit from them. It's happening all around us.
[+] [-] mypastself|3 years ago|reply
The author claims this is worrisome, but his reasoning seems flawed to me:
> a less productive economy is a smaller one with fewer resources to deal with social challenges like inequality
But again, we are not getting “less productive”, it’s the increase in productivity that’s getting slower.
The author then presumably wants to make us as productive as possible as soon as possible to solve this particular issue. His preferred candidate for this seems to be AI. The remainder of the article essentially an ad for advances in that specific technology.