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Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Jun-2025 23:41:59 JST Glyph

I do stand by this point but a lot of people have misinterpreted it, so I want to clarify. When I say genAI "doesn't work", I do not mean that these products cannot generate images, produce running code, emit what appears to be coherent language. Like, obviously, everyone can just watch it do that stuff. What I mean is that it does not appear to do any of those things to a level of quality that meaningfully improves productivity. It does not have positive ROI.
https://mastodon.social/@glyph/114583984865339173

In conversation about 11 days ago from mastodon.social permalink
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  Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Jun-2025 23:41:58 JST Glyph
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  Computer-automated accounting is *vastly* faster than doing it manually. Across entire industries, the cost of hardware & software — specifically, the systems which can perform tasks like email & accounting — is trivial. So it would seem that finding research to illustrate the explosive growth in productivity along with IT expenditures should be simple, right? I have learned that this is not the case, and in fact the fact that it is not the case is a whole field of study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
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    Productivity paradox
    
    The productivity paradox refers to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period. The term was coined by Erik Brynjolfsson in a 1993 paper ("The Productivity Paradox of IT") inspired by a quip by Nobel Laureate Robert Solow "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." For this reason, it is also sometimes also referred to as the Solow paradox. The productivity paradox inspired many research efforts at explaining the slowdown, only for the paradox to disappear with renewed productivity growth in the developed countries in the 1990s. However, issues raised by those research efforts remain important in the study of productivity growth in general, and became important again when productivity growth slowed around the world again from the 2000s to the present day. Thus the term "productivity paradox" can also refer to the more general disconnect between powerful computer technologies and weak productivity growth. 1970s to 1980s productivity paradox...
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  Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 12-Jun-2025 23:41:59 JST Glyph
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  However, I have also learned something significant from this discussion. Subjectively, I would consider the productivity impact of other computer automation tools, particularly computer networks, to be obvious. Like, obviously, an email system can send messages faster and cheaper than any paper mail system by orders of magnitude, right?
  
  In conversation about 11 days ago permalink
  
  Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 repeated this.

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