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I dunno computers should be world changing. And they are. Yet the lives of ordinary people have hardly improved and are arguably worse since the 1980s
If you replace "lives of ordinary people" by "productivity improvement", you actually have a good (and rarely discussed) point:
On that note, my personal hypothesis, even more controversial than "IT unproductive hypotheses" in the article that means IT was a rounding error relative to earlier major improvements, is: in many areas - particularly in office work and all kinds of everyday errands - IT is anti-productive, as in it makes people less productive on the net.
The core hypothesis behind my belief is that introduction of computers to replace a class of tasks - up to and including a whole job type - is just shifting the workload, diffusing it across many people, where previously it was concentrated in smaller number of specialists. Think e.g. the things you use Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. (or their equivalents from other vendors) for - before software ate it, a lot of that used to be someone's job. Now, it's just tacked onto everyone's workload, distracting people from doing the actual job they were paid to.
That would seem like obviously stupid way to do, so why would businesses all fall for it? I argue it's because even as shifting the workload makes everyone in the company less productive on the net, it looks like an improvement to accounting. Jobs with salaries are legible, clearly visible on the balance sheets. So is money saved by eliminating them. However, the overall productivity drop caused by smearing that same work across rest of the company? That's incremental, not obviously quantifiable. People and their salaries stay the same. So it all looks like introducing software and obsoleting some jobs saves everyone money - but then somehow, everyone is experiencing a "productivity paradox". But it's not a paradox if you ignore the financial metrics with their low resolution - focusing on what happens to work, it seems that IT improvements are mostly a lie.
If I understand it would be something like. You used to get a dedicated secretary. But now most of those roles are now handled by computer. So in a sense everyone has had their workload mildly increased. But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.
I would also add that it may be of a net benefit that fewer roles are needed. But that net benefit overwhelming goes to the owners of the company. And that's what we've been seeing the last 30+ years the very wealthy have become much more wealthy while everyone else is worse off. ()
() growing wealth inequality is very complex and I'm sure would be happening anyway. I'm not saying computers cause wealthy inequality but they don't seem to be doing much good in fixing it either
> But worse than that the workload is typically of a different nature so, for example, excessive meetings are now easy to generate.
That, but also:
- Secretaries were better at this work because that was their specialization, and they enjoyed efficiencies coming from focusing on doing a single specific kind of work.
- Those increments of extra work add up.
- Moving that work to everyone else means you now have highly paid specialists doing less and less of the specialized work they're paid for. In many cases (programming among them), context switching is costly, so the extra work disproportionately reduces their capacity at doing the thing they're good at.
This all adds up to rather significant loss of productivity.
If you work in the US for fang or similar your life is probably much better. I love computers. I love what they do for recreation and keeping in touch long distance. But work hours are longer. Education and housing is no longer affordable for most people. In the US life expectancy is beginning to drop. You would think people would have easier less stressful lives with greater financial security. But it's not the case for 99% of us.
Quick example. A doctor in the 90s would expect to look forward to less time wasted on paperwork thanks to computers but administration work is increasing. Likewise most professors at most universities will tell you they spend more and more time on administration. Shouldn't this be one of the primary things a computer could address.
My point is great gains brought by a technology such as computers may not translate to great end user benefit. Largely due to compensating inefficiencies elsewhere in the system.
So for example. It may be that chatgpt makes people 10x more productive. But if management gives bad direction it doesn't matter. If most software being developed is redundant then it doesn't matter. If most software is just making ads run faster then it doesn't matter. The technology needs to be appropriately directed to be of noticeable social benefit.
I think the catch here is that we need to know what makes admin work increase. While I can’t comment on education, at least for housing in Canada this is all a result of NIMBYism and government intervention. In other words, we could have slouched towards utopia much further than we have if it were not for NIMBYs.
That has nothing to do with what the poster is saying. And if tools improve but not quality of life, that is because minds are not improving along tools - this has been noted for centuries.
