Why isn’t new technology making us more productive? | Hacker News Reader

Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

nytimes.com

202 pointsgumby584 comments

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.

There's a weird disconnect with 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.

Word Processing is maybe not the best example. Human needs in terms of writing documents have not changed significantly in the last 20-30 years. The mechanics are not the bottleneck. neither is application startup time. I know that it is something you can measure but I don't agree that it is a significant data point. I generally only start a word processor once per day and then it stays running as I move between writing tasks and other tasks. Startup is an insignificant part of that time.

Other tasks have become more efficient in that time period. Anything involving graphics has gotten much easier to do on computers than before and can be done by more people. Project Management tools are much faster and easier to use.

What I do see in a corporate world is an emphasis efficiency that requires spending a lot more time tasks and running alternate scenarios to be more efficient. This seems more doable now because some of these things are easier but its too easy to ignore the time spent doing more of this kind of thing.

> 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.

Also known as Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

Sometimes it worries me. If we had a boring set of usable and safe tools to use for development, that would also be pretty fast, i wouldn't have to update my hardware every 5 years or so. But JetBrains IDE's (just one example) basically demand that I do, if I want their other shiny features.

Perhaps something like Java instead of Python. Perhaps something like Go instead of Java. Perhaps something like Rust instead of Go.

Just boring (predictable), stable and dependable programming languages, supported on every platform with a set of native libraries. Perhaps a bit like what LCL did in regards to GUI in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library

Ruby on Rails? Edit: for web apps

Ruby on Rails is pretty cool and nice to work with, but in my comparison it'd probably be somewhere next to Python as far as performance is concerned.

Oh, also, for a while I ran GitLab which is written in Ruby and still run OpenProject, which also is. Both of those underperformed and wanted both unreasonable amounts of memory whilst also running slowly when under load.

I'm yet to see a Rails codebase that can actually compete with the likes of Java/.NET/Go, since projects like Gitea are snappy and use about 1/10th of the RAM. Then again, nobody really picks languages/tech stacks for their performance outside of a few industries/domains where that is indeed necessary (HFT?).

Most of the time people just choose whatever is the easiest to work with, has the best integrations/frameworks/libraries and will let them ship features in a timely manner. Now, upgrading old Rails projects, though, is something that I cannot recommend doing. Very much not a fun experience.

> [XYZ] basically demand that I do, if I want their other shiny features

well, they aren't doing the demanding, if you're the one who wants those shiny features!

> well, they aren't doing the demanding, if you're the one who wants those shiny features!

That's just the thing: they use all of these browser based UI technologies, these slower scripting languages and other ways to ship software in a reasonable time and so i could have the actual fancy features that pertain to the logic...

...except that I'd be far happier if they hadn't cut those corners and I'd have a fully native app using the OS UI frameworks and so on. Of course, that isn't possible, if I want the software in the next few years, not a decade from now, or much more expensive (at least that's the prevailing argumentation).

In my eyes, it is the coupling between the desirable bits (what the software actually does) and the undesirable bits (mostly how it does it). But it's all about tradeoffs, similarly to how we often choose to ship code that isn't thoroughly tested just to meet some deadline.

Those technologies that make the IDE slow are the ones that improved the productivity of the developers of the IDE and let them deliver those features in a fraction of the time they would have needed 20 years ago. So their productivity improved. The productivity of their customers, I don't know. I'm not one of them and I can't judge. I guess it's a matter of the tradeoffs you wrote about.

IDEs 20 years ago were not vastly insufficient and there were many “RAD” (rapid application development) tools for those that leaned towards high level languages. Some were abominable like Visual Basic, but many of the web platforms used today are equally poor performers.

The modern GUI designers in IDEs are notably better, but many shops don’t take advantage of them due to issues with slow performance (eg storyboads in xcode) and issues with multiple developers modifying the resource files simultaneously.

Refactoring and static analysis tools are improved as well, but none of these improvements afford orders of magnitude in efficiency.

The biggest gains in efficiency come from the extended libraries, open source code, ORMs, and the fact that most of what is coded has already been built by someone into a framework or library.

Software development does not now require the expertise of knowing the intimate details of the code and how it works. Many modern apps are plugging together libraries that developers do not understand and are unable to fix any issues in those libraries. The default now is to Copy / paste from Stackoverflow or submit an issue to the library maintainer on github and pray that it gets fixed; or find another library and swap that in. Software development (especially web development) has become a more decentralized effort usually resulting into in a mishmash of layers and dependencies whose inefficiencies are allowed by the amazing hardware. Unfortunately, performance and user experience are sacrificed to the interests of “efficiency” and using the latest language/platform fad of the year.

I am doing mostly Ruby and code in Atom, or Sublime before that. I don't have noticeable starting times for my editor.

Long ago I started coding in gedit. Since then the language got only faster, I need less code because more major libs do more of my work.

Also my computer is like 8 years old, my laptop until recently was over 10 years old and my current one about 3 or 4 (T420 and T480s)

Ruby is not native, but we'll portable. My point is this 'boring' work style is here, people just choose to not use it.

> I am doing mostly Ruby and code in Atom, or Sublime before that. I don't have noticeable starting times for my editor.

That's interesting, because there have been articles that indicate that Atom has not only comparatively worse startup times (which may or may not matter to people), but also really bad typing latency: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/

In particular, this image gets the point across well: https://pavelfatin.com/images/typing/editor-latency-windows-...

> Ruby is not native, but we'll portable. My point is this 'boring' work style is here, people just choose to not use it.

This is a good point, though! As far as I know, plenty of people still use Ruby (typically on Rails), or also other "batteries included" solutions like Python and Django pretty successfully.

That said, most of these languages have pretty severe limitations in regards to their performance and resource usage: https://jaxenter.com/energy-efficient-programming-languages-...

Some lovely benchmarks seem to confirm that, in relatively real world conditions: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

Admittedly, that doesn't matter for all projects, but why couldn't we have the ease of use of Python with the performance of Rust and the developer experience of Rails/Django?

I actually think we reached peak word processing. The only word processed documents that I ever see are things that nobody will ever read, such as HR announcements, functional procedures, and dissertations. Today, more people write in the e-mail editor or chat app. Even students no longer need word processing. When my kids were in grade school, they were required to follow formatting standards that included page margins, for documents that would never be printed. Today, they use whatever cloud editor is convenient.

I wonder how much of today's software is designed to make us more productive or efficient, by helping us manage... software?

I read a small municipal report from the early 1980s, and it was so refreshing to read; very slim, got to the point. Probably because somehow had to type it by hand, so anything not useful was edited out. By the late 1980s in offices and the early 90s at home, it became too easy to copy+paste. Document lengths spiraled out of control.

And the "async programming" that is advocated everywhere is still the same as Windows 3.1 cooperative multitasking, just with better branding.

Depends on what you mean by async programming. If you literally mean async and await as available in Haskell, Rust, C#, JS, Python etc. Then no that's definitely not the same thing as windows 3.1's cooperative multitasking.

The async and await is just syntactic sugar that makes you more addicted to it.

The syntactic sugar is the entire point. If you don't have it it just sucks as a technology.

Sometimes green threads require no syntactic featutes at all, e.g. Lua coroutines. You yield() through the stack and resume() back when “done”.

  local data = readfile("file1”)
  writefile("file2", data)

The above example may have async/await-ed two times without any sugar. I believe that’s exactly what coop-mt code would look like (but at the lower level, because of hw stack instead of heap-based), Tbf I never did that in windows 3.x, do I miss something?

And structured programming is just sugar over GOTOs.

Polymorphism is just sugar over type inspection and branching.

Recursion-free function calls are just sugar over variable renaming and text movement.

Correct, but that misses the point, which is that async programming is NOT sugar over the more powerful approach of preemptive multitasking (introduced in Windows sometime after version 3.1).

Assuming that we know how promises and syscall-triggered context switches work, what’s the important difference?

It's the Visual Basic event loop from the Windows 3.1 / 95 times. One thread doing all the job with callbacks for events. Events were almost only UI events back then.

> 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.

Performance has improved dramatically, but latency went up too.

I don't think I've ever had computer with lower latency in any application than when using my M1 Pro MacBook. Sure, it's 20 years of hardware innovation, but at least someone is doing something right.

Keyboard button press to screen response is ~100ms whereas an Apple IIe was 35ms.

Apple had the iPad Pro pencil latency down to 30ms in 2017: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

How'd you measure that?

Most measurements were taken with the 240fps camera (4.167 ms resolution) in the iPhone SE. Devices with response times below 40 ms were re-measured with a 1000fps camera (1 ms resolution), the Sony RX100 V in PAL mode.

> The limit is human perception.

I couldn't disagree more. The general choppiness a modern application has is noticeable by literally everyone. I'm so bothered by it that I even went back to a wired mouse recently because the latency of my bluetooth mouse made me uneasy. And another point is that VR is rewriting entire technology stacks JUST to get lower latencies, precisely because a lot of people just get sick if it isn't good enough. 120Hz+ displays are becoming more commonplace thank god. And I could go on.

We had low latency input and smooth animation 30 years ago. The latency and lag of modern user interfaces is all in the layers and layers of software. It's especially noticeable when you look at like NES games and the like, they ran at 50 or 60 FPS (depending on PAL or NTSC) and typically had zero input lag (unless there was some sprite limit being exceeded). Modern games at 50 FPS are so sluggish you feel like you've downed a full bottle of wine or something. The difference is the time it takes to render a frame today, which can be 100ms or more, especially when the GPU is struggling.

But what I meant was like pixel density and so on. My screen is a lot higher resolution than it was 20 years ago, but it doesn't actually display much more information as my ability to actually resolve fine details has if anything worsened with the years. My screen is farther away and my font size higher, that's the big difference.

I've actually really struggled with slow, unoptimised software forever. Microsoft Word's Equation editor is so slow and sluggish that once you've written one page of equations or more it just becomes unusable, since it's not feasible to wait several seconds for the equations you typed in to appear.

It's the same with code editors. Sublime Text 3 is crazy responsive and it's a joy to use, however I missed certain features that VS Code had, so I switched, however the latency issues are very noticeable. Typing is a little slower, switching tabs is very slow (like 100-ish ms?) and when you're opening new files you could literally watch the text being color coded before your eyes on my i7 laptop I used back then. Things got worse when I started developing Flutter applications while running the Flutter and Dart extensions. VS Code would sometimes take several seconds to react to me pressing the backspace button, which made it incredibly frustrating to work with.

How is it possible that our computers are so incredibly performant these days, yet seemingly not fast enough for simple document editing or text editing tasks?

But you also had completely different apps for every operating system, file formats were completely incompatable, you needed to shlep those files around using disks to get them between multiple computers, those disks were unreliable, and heaven help you if the power went out in the middle of saving, lest that file be lost for good.

> performs about the same as MS Word did on a 486 with a floppy

Except (gdocs for comparison) I now can:

1. Effortlessly access the doc on multiple devices, wherever there is cell or WiFi. 2. See a visual history of every change I've ever made to the doc. 3. Collaborate with many other people in real time. 4. Easily incorporate images, tables, drawings, and other files. 5. Compare documents. 6. Use other character sets and emoji. 7. Add, have others add, and review comments.

I'm sure there's more. I don't remember everything about how primitive things were 30 years ago.

Right, but how many things are actually central to document processing?

All of it, what do you think isn’t?

Literally 100% of the documents I process are sent to other people. So collaboration and sending documents are core functionality.

It’s even stronger than you suggest, the actual “word processing” bits turned out to be a vestige of a paper world and “collaborative text editing” was actually the killer feature.

I wonder why we use paper layout on Word/GDocs despite it never be printed.

> actually central to document processing?

ahh, the no true scotsman style of logical fallacy.

Document processing is not strict nor defined. The features listed in the parent comment are all very useful, and if the floppy disk document processor of 30 years ago could do it, the people there would also find it useful.

Yes they would find it useful, but in terms of productivity what's it worth? For the things that aren't collaboration, it's probably single digits. Real-time collaboration is worth a lot for certain documents, but also you could have managed that on a 486 if you had a modem.

Recently I opened a Full HD video in a web browser, connected my laptop to a TV using an HDMI cable, moved the browser window over to the TV screen, and watched the video. And it just worked, with sound and all. I didn't have to download or configure anything, neither on the computer nor on the TV. That would have been utterly unbelievable 20 years ago, bordering on magic (especially the no-download/no-configuration part).

I'm pretty sure XP let you hot plug displays?

You could simply open windows media player and stream video 20 years ago. The resolution would have been the main impressive thing, along with how much money you spent on that high speed internet connection. But far from utterly unbelievable. I'm not sure anyone would have cared which program you used.

In theory, maybe. In practice? Something would have broken, or you'd have to fiddle with some settings, or you'd have to download the video (somehow) before you could play it in a standalone program – the experience would have been much less streamlined, at least. Also, which single cable would you have used to carry video and audio, and which could be plugged into a laptop and a TV?

> Something would have broken, or you'd have to fiddle with some settings

I don't remember any trouble with screens or moving windows around or doing streaming video around that time.

> Also, which single cable would you have used to carry video and audio, and which could be plugged into a laptop and a TV?

Oh, I didn't realize you were suggesting the audio moved to the TV. Well HDMI came out a couple years later and didn't really blow minds.

> Well HDMI came out a couple years later and didn't really blow minds.

Of course not. All of those improvements were, taken on their own, iterative and evolutionary – as nearly all technological development is. But taken together, they make a big difference.

Except I'm saying all those other things already worked fine. Your scenario is an incremental change between then and today. If you want that super impressive effect you need to compare against longer ago than 2002. If you do that in 1992, wow.

You could still do a 20 year comparison if you wanted, 1992 vs. 2012. Since the experience has barely changed in the last 10 years.

An ActiveX control or Netscape plugin accomplished this just fine 20+ years ago.

> 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.

It is now trivial to embed high definition photographs in a document. There is a figure-creation tool right there in the application. I can make notes and comments and mark up a document. I have an automatic and recoverable record of the history of my document. I can collaboratively edit that document with people from across the world. I have spellcheck that works across dozens (perhaps hundreds) of languages.

In the sense that we have a WISIWYG editor whose primary interaction is a keyboard typing letters - sure. But I wouldn't describe this as "about the same."

> could you tell that you're not in the 80s?

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.

> vacuum cleaners

mainstream since at least the 1950s

> dishwashers

1970s

> microwave ovens

available but fairly expensive in the 80s, ubiquitous in the 90s

The point was vacuums etc have gotten a lot better over time.

Electric motors are noticeably lighter, more powerful, and more energy efficient today. Yes vacuums in the 1980’s worked but they where significantly heavier, louder, and far more power hungry not to mention more expensive. It might not seem like much but I remember the exhaust from the family vacuum being noticeably warm. It’s even more noticeable with cordless vacuums which got not just better motors but vastly better batteries as well.

Often it’s the parts you don’t notice that make a world of difference. The finger saver shutoff on a modern saw might not seem like much, but those things really make a difference in peoples lives.

> finger saver shutoff

Probably a feature I wouldn't want to give up.

The Dyson bagless/root cyclonic vacuum design completely took over.

"Hoovering" really became dysoning.

I don't think that was the point. The OP said "we have [them]", not "they've gotten better".

I agree, Dyson is quite a bit better than the vacuum my parents had (though central vac was pretty damn good).

Dishwashers are quieter, though not that different. Microwaves seem about the same.

Fair enough, though convection microwaves are a real improvement. Traditional microwaves meanwhile cost about 1/10th as much as an 80’s microwave which is noticeable in it’s own way.

Dishwashers use a fraction of the water they used to. It is more water and power efficient to use a dishwasher then to wash dishes by hand. [1]

In all these responses what I'm noticing is people missing the vast gains in efficiency from our appliances over the last few decades: everything we have gives more, and uses less.

[1] https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2008/data/papers/1_1...

On the other side the water and energy use has been trade off for time use. Living in country with plenty of fresh water I might prefer to waste some for faster cycle time. So in sense things have actually gotten worse.

It’s not really about water use. Dishwashers require very hot water, so less water directly translates into dramatically less energy use.

Hmm, in the US anyway they started to get inexpensive by 1980 or so, same as VCRs.

>> vacuum cleaners >mainstream since at least the 1950s

Canister vacuums date to the 1910s and were probably mainstream by the 1930s (wasn't Herbert Hoover mocked by connecting him to Hoover Vacuums?)

Battery powered vacuums are ubiquitous now and were not in the 1980s (for example the first Dirt Devil model was corded.)

> mainstream since at least the 1950s

Of course. What about battery powered vacuum cleaners?

Flooring has changed too. Carpets are better looking and more resilient. Click vinyl is stronger, has good texture, easier to install, and is super durable.

> You wouldn't expect walls and carpets to change

Yes, but even there we're not using flammable polystyrene ceiling tiles, nor asbestos floor tiles and asbestos glue any more.

Window insulation and heating/cooling efficiency are often greatly improved as well.

Also air conditioning is ubiquitous.

Not to mention:

Ugly (but very bright and power efficient, and cooler) LED lighting. Bright blue power LEDs on everything. Less fluorescent, minimal incandescent lighting.

Everyone is working at home.

Few books, no newspapers or print magazines, no typewriters, maybe even no wired telephone.

The post office only delivers packages and "junk mail."

No "long distance" phone charges.

No ash trays.

New/improved appliances: air fryers, instant pot/automated pressure/multifunction cookers, high-efficiency washing machines, etc.. Fewer toaster ovens and gas ranges or ovens.

Mandatory smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms.

Lower power usage for most appliances.

No bottle returns. Much more "recycling" and industrial compost.

No large stereo systems, AM/FM radio, cassette players, or boom boxes. Fewer (and poorer quality) record players.

Home delivery of everything via amazon, grocery delivery, restaurant food delivery, etc.. UPS, FedEx and Amazon deliver many more packages than the USPS.

Fewer people actually own their houses.

Student loan debt. More monthly bills in general.

Makita made the first power tools running on batteries in 1978...

Yeah but they were pretty terrible until relatively recently.

Main problem with them was NiMh battery had a shorter battery life, and was easy to ruin. First lithium battery was made in 70s as well. First lithium ion was in mid 80s However till the 90s they were not really a commercially viable item to use in products. So its still 80s tech in some regards.

Heat pump mini split is a thing in 80s.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that heat pumps and vacuum cleaners and microwaves didn't exist in the 80s.

> 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?

> 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.

Also they go wrong a hell of a lot less often. 80s cars were mostly complete shit and no one was sorry to see them go.

Also if you crash one, you're vastly less likely to die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck

I always liked this IIHS crash test: 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu

It really shows the progress. Seatbelts, the "rigid cage" to protect the driver, air bags, etc. etc.

The 1959 Bel Air crash-dummy is clearly dead, bouncing around the cabin during the crash.

The 2009 Malibu crash-dummy has a sprained neck and the face hurts from hitting the air-bag, but clearly survives.

I see 50s-80s cars on TV and all I can visualise is that thin metal hoop steering wheel bisecting my face like a melon.

Depending on the age of the car your skull could also be cored by the steering column like an apple.

In the 50's the industry propaganda, parroted by bought and paid for regulators, was that all people involved in an automobile collision were irresponsible drivers deserving of death and disfigurement. And especially so for the colored ones, they probably drove recklessly after stealing them. You can't trust the lot of 'em.

Absolutely agreed, as someone who's driven around in an 80s deathtrap car quite a bit.

However, it IS unfortunate that we've shifted the risk to people AROUND those vehicles instead of the driver. People drive around in their noise-insulated, airbag-laden tanks these days and they're definitely safer. But it's unfortunate that pedestrians and bicyclists around those cars are actually more likely do die in the event of a crash now because vehicles are so ridiculously tall and overbuilt.

If you ask me, I'd rather that driving was more dangerous for the driver than people around the vehicle. They're the ones taking the risk when they drive poorly. It's unfortunate that the externalities are imposed on those around them instead, now.

And your house doesn’t burn to the ground every time there’s a short in the system

That was not happening as a matter of course in the 1980s.

The basic mechanism to reduce such risks was established in the '80s.

The 1880s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UL_(safety_organization)

Have you ever looked at 1950s electrical wiring? How about electrical appliances from the 1950s?

We used to have Christmas tree lights from the 1950s that were passed down from our grandparents. Two unshielded wires and no fuses, we burned out many an outlet and tripped the breaker every year.

I can barely get modern Christmas lights to last more than one season.

The original claim was house fires in the 1980s of electrical origin. That stock would generally have been built since the 1950s (largely 1960--1990, for the decade of the 1980s).

Candes, fireplaces, cigarettes, and cooking stand out in my memory.

A current industry report puts cooking as the greatest risk, followed by heating equipment. Electrical ranks third:

https://www.nfpa.org/News%20and%20Research/Data%20research%2...

I don't have trending data at this point. If you or others care to provide any, that would be appreciated.

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.

I think your last sentence is unnecessary. What purpose does it serve?

It relates the audience and the author on an emotional level.

Once an argument has been laid out in detail, providing a poignant summary in one sentence leaves a more lasting impression on the reader.

So your argument is that all technical advancement in the last 50/60 years is just marketing?

That’s a pretty bold statement supported by literally nothing, just because you don’t feel like certain tech has added anything doesn’t mean it hasn’t.

Productivity is an incredibly hard thing to capture, especially with the move to away from manufacturing and physical production.

One could easily argue that the productivity numbers are failing to increase because technology has lowered the barriers to entry all over the world so now there’s more competition for every good and service creating pricing pressure on the “value of goods and services produced”

I think you may have replied to the wrong person? Your comment is on topic for the tree, but doesn't appear to apply at all to the person you directly replied to.

> 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.

Honestly, it seems like you're just picking some incremental or marginal technological changes that happened, then promoting them to something more fundamental than they really are. Electric cars? Come on. They're barely even a change from a consumer perspective. Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

And some of those other things are debatable. For instance: I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything (e.g. by picking weird routes that were marginally faster but very difficult to systematize). [Edit: The following is about non-map online information.] The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.

Sufficiently advanced marketing is indistinguishable from technological progress.

Personally I try to turn GPS off as much as possible but I also frequently consult it even for routes that I know well. And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there. Last weekend I was frustrated that Google was unaware of a road reroute but that is leaps and bounds ahead of the days of paper maps. Yeah, there's a lot of garbage on the Internet but it's also remarkably easy to find high-quality information.

The change over even 10 years ago is also really dramatic for how I use public transit, since I not only know where I am but where the vehicles I'm planning on getting into are so I can reroute that way. It's only in the past 5 years or so that the data has gotten reliable enough that I trust it to use in that way.

I agree that GPS and maps/directions are a magnificent improvement.

I remember what it was like to get lost, and be lost for hours, late at night nothing open, no one but unsavory characters out.

I remember how hard long trips could be even with maps or trip-tiks from AAA (which were awesome)

GPS enables all sort logistics, it allows transport companies to ensure trucks are driven safely, to know when and where goods in transit are there is an entire world of productivity improvement right there.

But you need to be aware of the downsides of becoming inadvertently over-reliant on GPS [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS

No offense, but that’s not really a downside of GPS, people make bad decisions all the time tech or no tech.

It'll also route you around major delays if it can. This saved me a three hour tailback only weeks ago (arriving at work after lunch would have been...irritating) and literally last week I didn't bother to set it on the way home and ended up in 30 minutes of standing traffic that it would have told me to avoid (there's an alternate route that's 10 minutes slower, but once you're in the wrong road you're committed and can't go back).

> Personally I try to turn GPS off as much as possible but I also frequently consult it even for routes that I know well.

I'm not saying it's not useful. I'm just saying it's not as big of an advance as it's being made out to be.

> And come on, maps are excellent, there's no garbage there.

I've above clarified, but my "garbage" comment was not referring to maps, but other kinds of material you'd fine online. Maps are actually one of the few types of online references that tends to have very little garbage.

Not only gps, but just being able to find nearby hotels and check vacancy and prices. When I was a kid, we would pull in at multiple hotels and someone would have to go in and ask for prices and if they had vacancy. My mom would usually go and ask for the price because my dad felt like they gave her better prices. In fact, a few times they did - as he sent her in after he asked.

So not only convenience and leveling the information playing field, but pricing fairness. I'm sure quite a few minorities would have some testimonials about the benefits of getting quoted the same price as everyone else.

> ...we would pull in at multiple hotels and someone would have to go in and ask for prices and if they had vacancy.

Did they say they had only room left and 3 people were looking at it right now, despite it being obvious the hotel was only half occupied?

Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent. Also, there were travel agents (a rare breed these days) who could assist with booking flights, hotels, and sightseeing. There seems to be advantages and disadvantages to each era.

However, I largely consider technology advances to be rather unimpressive, especially services and apps built on the internet. Access to information has definitely been improved though, but this is one of the few major improvements and now with more information being siloed behind corporate mega-sites we may be regressing back to the libraries for free access again.

> Actually, I recall being able to haggle prices at hotels before the online booking sites became prominent.

On family trips in the 90s, I'm pretty sure my dad almost never paid the asking price for our rooms. If you were coming in from about the mid-evening on, without a reservation, but they still had some rooms unlikely to be filled, and there were any other hotels with vacancies around, they'd gladly knock off a few dollars if you asked, since the alternative was likely having $0 of income for that room, that night.

What I've noticed traveling more recently is that there seem to be fewer vacancies if you try that "just show up and find a room" thing (which used to almost always work out fine, except at extremely popular places on very busy travel weeks), like the whole industry's running with way less slack (i.e. more efficiently). But also room prices have gone batshit crazy, even more so than general inflation, so the savings from that efficiency doesn't seem to be reaching customers.

You can always come to the less technologically advanced country and haggle all you want. I'm in one of those countries right now, and believe me, it's a lot worse when you actually need to do that every time you try to use any service.

After moving there I've started to appreciate a decent, frictionless, fixed price service a lot more.

I find some of these platforms to be far from frictionless. Try doing a basic sort based on price in AirBnb; it does not include the fees in the sorted price making it difficult to find the best deal. Many sites have false reviews that are manipulated to increase their ratings and push an undesirable hotel into a “deal” that hides the actually hotel for instance. Priceline, for example, is no longer the deal that it used to be and many of the actual hotel sites have better prices or match the ones on Priceline.

I mean, yes, there's a lot to improve because of bad actors and review manipulations. But for example, you can find a taxi through Uber relatively easy instead of wasting half an hour finding a driver who will a) get you where you want and b) take what's advertised through Uber instead of 4x-5x of that price.

I went on a trip across Europe without checking any maps in advance and without any maps in my car. Multiple times. I never visited those countries before and arrived at precise locations, on time, without any kind of error.

For me that’s incredible and very reliable. Thousand of kilometers to arrive in a place I’ve never been before without memorizing the road in advance is innovation. My dad never could’ve done that at my age.

Reading this comment and most of the thread, what is missing is the human part of the experience. GPS directions are terrific, indeed, but you are choosing (by not "checking any maps in advance") to completely pass up the opportunity to explore, to wander, to discover.

You went all the way to Europe and didn't even look at a map? You could have been 100 yards from some amazing place and never even known it. Your dad never would have done that.

Technology has generally eliminated the worst scenarios -- getting totally lost or stranded -- but also generally eliminated the best -- discovering something new, an unexpected detour. I can also speak from experience and say that I barely remember the trips in which every detail was planned and executed exactly according to plan. The times when I was lost, or had no place to sleep, often turned out to be the best and most memorable trips of my life. Actually being forced to interact with other human beings has its upsides.

On the contrary, it’s been way easier to change course and visit things along the way because I didn’t have to worry about losing the memorized road. In the GPS there is POI as well which help not to miss amazing spots along the way … I mean how easier could it be when I change the itinerary because I’m seeing a Castel in the horizon and not worry about having to wonder how to get back on tracks …

A GPS makes it even easier to discover the world

I have an entire category "Nice to visit" in my Google maps, it has a distinct marking and I do visit those places when I am around. There are thousands of amazing places in Europe and it would be a full time job to visit them every time you have an opportunity. You just can't visit them all while on the trip, because you will never get to the destination.

Yes, because you've consulted a map (google maps) and created your list. My comment was not addressing situations like yours. The original poster specifically said "without checking any maps in advance and without any maps in my car."

Saying you personally stopped using GPS when most people do is as akin to the old meme, “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 10 years”.

> Saying you personally stopped using GPS when most people do is as akin to the old meme, “do people still watch TV? I haven’t watched TV in 10 years”.

No it isn't. I moved to a new city and realized after a couple years that I still barely knew my way around. I then correctly diagnosed that the cause was the overuse of turn-by-turn directions. You're trying to frame it as some hipster cooler-than-thou thing, when it isn't.

The point is, a couple of anecdotes don’t prove the rule. You might not find GPS useful, but a lot of people find it immensely useful and revolutionary.

If your use case is travelling to a new place once or twice and never again, there is no point memorising the route / area.

Memorising a route doesn’t help you figure out there is an accident on the route, or unusually heavy traffic.

I don’t disagree with you about memorising common routes and learning about your local area, it’s a good thing to do imo. It’s just no longer required because technology is good enough to let you get by without having to do that.

> Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

I was surprised the first time a Tesla went by because I had no idea a car could be that quiet.

A Tesla is a fucking space ship compared to the cars people had in the 50s...

So is a Jag, or Ferrari, and a Lamborghini may well actually _be_ a spaceship. The method of propulsion isn't what would make them point and go "spaceship"

> Electric cars? Come on. They're barely even a change from a consumer perspective. Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference, unless you told them exactly what they were looking at.

Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consider owning an ICE car.

I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right?

You know electric cars aren't a new invention, right? First ones came about in the 1880s, and they were quite common in the early 20th century.

Sure, not common in 1950, but the user experience difference between an ICE car and electric is, to a 1950s or 1910s person, basically noise. The ICE car is noisy, electric not. The acceleration, ride comfort, features - all are similar enough to be interchangeable to someone far removed from this time.

> The acceleration, ride comfort, features

This is not true at all. Ride comfort and features is massively improved in todays cars compared to 1950. Or to 1980. That goes for both the driver and passenger.

Depends on what you want in a car and what you mean by ride comfort. Very few cars made today ride as smoothly as a 1970-80 land yachts made by Cadillac and Lincoln for example. Also, many newer cars are unrepairable without special equipment and some don’t even provide service manuals to owners. Good luck getting your Tesla fixed quickly while traveling in remote locations versus a traditional car. Good luck finding a new battery for it if China supply lines are hampered by a pandemic or some other issue. Electric cars aren’t a panacea.

Bottom line is that cars have been available to get us from point A to point B at high speeds for over 100 years and that is why we buy them.

> Very few cars made today ride as smoothly as a 1970-80 land yachts made by Cadillac and Lincoln for example.

Active (electromagnetic) suspension systems are a huge improvement over the 1970-80 land yachts that couldn't corner to save their lives.

Better yet, you can adapt your suspension system to ride however you want.

Perhaps. But the old Cadillac is/was much cheaper and who needs to race around corners in a land yacht. Those fancy new adjustable suspensions are notorious for failing and cost as much as the car to replace. Know someone that just sold their 5 year old car with one of these systems that failed due to the $5000 to repair out of warranty. Cadillac would be new shocks/struts on all four wheels and out the door for less than $1000 and these components rarely fail within 15 years.

Get a sports car for fast corners.

Basically, if we ignore all improvements in comfort, speed and safety, there are no improvements in comfort, speed and safety.

Except you'd become a write-off yourself after getting into a car accident in a Cadillac/Lincoln. Especially if you didn't buy the safety belt option :)

Battery chemistry and renewable energy have advanced significantly. I appreciate and share your overly broad cynicism, but the technological advances of the past couple of centuries have been the exception rather than the norm of stagnation throughout human history. I think it's okay to acknowledge and celebrate advancements we've made in many fields recently.

In the context of the question being posted electric cars don’t move the needle for productivity. I spent three glorious days with a Tesla performance M3 in Texas recently. The driving experience is, for me, unparalleled. But it was definitely not more productive by any metric I’d use.

Never going to the gas station?

The fact that the per-mile cost is much lower? Isn't that pretty much the definition of productivity?

That wasn’t my experience at all. I spent substantially more time and cognitive energy keeping it topped off than i ever have an ICE vehicle. I’m sure if I lived in the area I could have installed a charger of sufficient capacity to start off every morning at 80% but i needed to hit a supercharger for 20+ minutes per day to do that.

Potential downsides entirely ruin the concept. Think of having to find charging spot every week, potential waiting for days if not weeks for one to open up. The continuous degradation of range. The charge time on longer trips, with the potential of having to wait the mentioned days or weeks on each charging session.

I own an electric car, and I know many, many others that own them as well. Everything you've written is ludicrous - I can assure you nobody is waiting days or weeks to charge. If anything the situation is much better than gas cars as 99% of the time I just charge at home.

> Never going to the gas station?

Not a big deal. And on long trips with an electric car, don't you have to plan around relatively extended stops at (currently) relatively rare charging stations?

Not really, no. Took a drive from Seattle to Oregon a bit ago (200 miles one way), never once have i planned around charging stations or even thought of them.

Took a quick look at the map of the superchargers exactly once before the trip, just to doubly make sure there are any at all on the way, and that was it. The car navigation system automatically added the needed one to the path and showed exactly the calculated amount of charge i should have left by the time i get to the charger and/or destination. There were at least 6 supercharger stations on the path to my destination (didnt even look at the regular chargers).

I didnt charge my car prior to the trip, it had about 40% charge before I headed out. A bit past halfway through to the destination, i stopped at a supercharger (that the car notified me about and added as a stop on the navigation as soon as i started the trip, because it calculated i won't have enough charge to make it to the destination). Charged the car to 90% in about 40 mins tops (was one of the older v2 145kW superchargers, the v3 ones that I've seen before are much faster), went to mcdonalds and stretched my legs in the meantime.

There was a tradeoff of stops vs charge time: i waited to 90% to avoid additional supercharger stops, but if i was ok with those, my stop time would have been even shorter, because the charge speed is faster the less charge you have, it is like a logarithmic curve. I.e., about 10 mins of wait for 100 miles of range on the lower end of the charge, but 40 mins if i want to reach the 90% (with the total range being about 330 miles total).

I went into a lot of detail to explain things here, but during that trip (around 400 miles total), at no point have i even thought of or planned for charging specifically, the navigation system handled it for me just fine with pretty much no detours. And i wasn't driving through dense city areas either. Once i got out of Seattle and nearby areas (about 30 mins into the trip), it was all rural areas through and through, but somehow they still had about 7 supercharger stations conveniently placed on the way.

It's very regional. There are 2 route variations for me to travel to a large city 300 miles away, with one of them having a clear disadvantage (a stop further from the highway by a meaningful amount).

Of course electric cars are a big improvement in many ways. But it’s not revolutionary in the same way as cars compared with horses. The usage pattern between ICE and electric cars are more or less he same, while a horse require care for significant time several times a day whether you use it or not. Not to talk about the space requirement, speed, range or power.

> Wut? I call major bullshit on this. Yes, obviously electric cars generally do the same thing as ICE cars, but the consumer experience is so much better for me is that after owning an electric car I will never, ever even consider owning an ICE car.

Nope, sorry. An electric car is still just a car, not some revolutionary different thing. It gets you from A to be exactly the same, the only difference is you plug it in at night rather than visiting a gas station.

> I mean, by your analogy, an ICE car is just an "incremental or marginal improvement" over a horse and buggy. Heck, I've got to feed my horse grass and clean up after its poop, and I've got to "feed" my ICE car gas and clean up after its oil leaks. What's the difference, right

Nope, sorry. A car is an order of magnitude faster, have far longer range, haul more than a horse and buggy.

> And some of those other things are debatable. For instance: I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything

That’s a fine personal choice to make if you value building up geographic knowledge for its own sake, but I don’t really get your point. You could say the same thing about giving up your dishwasher because you value hand washing dishes for its own sake.

I drove from California to Panama 3 years ago. In Central America Google navigation was not only useless, but sometimes dangerous so we turned it off. We were only asking locals for directions. After a few days we did not experience any inconvenience.

> Someone from 1950 wouldn't even notice the difference

You really should go to some museum or google how cars in 1950 looked like, functioned and sounded.

> I deliberately stopped using GPS for several years, because I realized it was preventing me from building up geographic/navigational knowledge, and instead was just training me to follow instructions blindly and never learn anything

You are in minority there from pretty much all aspects. People are not ditching GPS. They are not looking into GPS constantly either, generally people don't go to places they don't know that often. And if you are refusing "weird shortcuts" then you are lessening your geographical knowledge even more - you are opting out for routes with easy to memorize milestones instead of learning how streets are really connected.

>The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.

I don't agree at all. Especially in the sciences, the collaboration across countries over the internet has been tremendous. The ability to instantly know what papers are being published in your field and use their results to further your own research can't be overstated. We rely on that to do our work at our company. But going back to tech, the ability to do open source projects _at all_ wouldn't have been possible before. The interconnected nature reduces 'local maximas' of knowledge, skill and expertise. I have learnt so many things from watching youtube DIY channels that I otherwise would never have in my own local community.

And so I ask - What makes your claim "probably true"?

> The computerized "knowledge at your fingertips" is a common slogan of computer-age propaganda, but it's probably true that a greater fraction of that "knowledge" is in fact garbage and overall may just be a marginal improvement.

IMO the Web has done a terrible job of realizing all the wonderful knowledge-spreading and educational purposes it was supposed to.

What it has done is make it so idle, trivial thoughts that would hardly have reached the level of consciousness before, become an itch until I find out the answer—because now I can find out the answer ("who was that one actor in that one show"). And it's great at answering those kinds of questions.

It's 2022 and in tons of fields you'll still run out of material on the Web as soon as you go past the barest surface of a topic, and have to go track down some books (which may have no digitized version, so I mean actual books). I have niche reference books from decades ago that are exactly the kind of thing that an online catalog-of-knowledge ought to be good at, but what's on the web is far less complete than them. That kind of thing.

All that, plus it's so crammed full of spammy shit that using it is like trying to track down a poorly-marked Little Free Library box on the Vegas strip.

Physical libraries with inter-library loan remain much more valuable overall—and university libraries, especially—which is kind of pathetic.

The most valuable sites on the Web are probably piracy websites like Library Genesis, and they still can't deliver everything you can get on dead trees. But they come the closest.

GPS is nice and all, but I would not say we move vastly differently compared to 30 years ago or even 70 years ago (basically, since interstate highways were developed). And electric motors are just a horizontal change in technology. They may have better acceleration than ICEs, but we're still going to be fundamentally traveling the same way. Only if and when self-driving becomes a thing, or personal drone transport vehicles become widespread, or cheap tunnels enabled by electric vehicles, would you be able to argue that a fundamental shift in how we move has occurred. That may be all just around the corner, or those dreams could go the way of the dream of the flying car in the 50s.

We definitely communicate vastly different than 30 years ago and prior.

I upgraded from a 95 4Runner to a 22 Outlander and it’s like a spaceship on wheels in comparison.

Literally every piece of the car is in a different class and the tech is insane that just didn’t exist then, I mean it basically drives itself. It’s dramatically safer, more efficient, comfier, faster, quieter.

I no longer hate long drives, they’re quite nice. The speakers are amazing and the road noise is basically gone. I can stream anything, talk to friends anywhere in the world while driving, massage and heat my back, and do it all with half the gas at a cost that’s equivalent to the 4Runner when it was new back then. It also goes 110 as comfortably as the 4Runner would do about 60, and breezes up hills that the latter would break a sweat on. I press a button for roadside assistance, I lock and start/stop it from my phone, I don’t have to bother with the key, the list just never ends.

Meanwhile a car from 1965 honestly is a lot more similar to a 95 than a 95 to today.

A 95 4Runner restored to like new condition would be an excellent ride today, Gad mileage notwithstanding.

Run out vs. new is a straw man w/r/t/ old tech vs new.

It was super well maintained, nothing was wrong with it.

You replaced all the shocks, suspension bushings, motor mounts, tie rods, seat cushions, etc? Without doing all that, you cannot compare the ride of a 20 year old car to a new car. You probably thought the car had nothing wrong with it, but you just got used to the harsher ride due the components wearing out over time.

Yea, actually it was fully restored by the previous owner who was a mechanic, new engine (and gaskets which were famous for exploding on those models), suspension and all. Under 100k miles too and the body was perfect, even interior was amazing. I loved the car, but it just absolutely doesn’t compare to modern cars.

I haven't owned a car in well over a decade, but new cars in the 80s and 90s were just trash compared to the 2000s, and aside from the absence of manual transmissions and some models putting too many features behind touch-screens they only seem to have gotten better.

I'd say around early 90s things started changing for the better in US cars... before then they were complete trash.

Your 22 Outlander won't last as long as your 1995 car.

There's just too much tech in it that will go wrong, or be unsupported in 10 years.

No one will know how to fix it.

We are adding complexity where we should not be, but then cars are designed to be sold, not to be used for more than 3 years.

Completely wrong, in aggregate. Vehicle longevity and reliability have significantly increased over that time period. However, when an unproven new car is compared to an old car that has already survived for a long time, it’s possible you may be right.

The same new cars that need the entire transmission replaced if any one thing goes wrong in it? Compared to those poorly built old cars where you could blow a gasket and just put a new one in?

Yes, exactly those. I would recommend reasoning backwards from the longevity statistics to the potential reasons for the changes to the designs of individual parts and systems.

Based on my calculations, it was money.

Sort of. Try looking at the relationship between longevity, resale value, purchase price and margin.

Unibody trucks will not outlast their framed predecessors.

Swap in a 2022 Toyota 4Runner and my argument stands. I was hoping I didn’t have to state that obvious fact. I also have a 10 year warranty so in 10 years it will definitely be serviced.

As the sibling comment points out on average longevity is way up, another point against older cars. Safety also way, way up.

Nostalgia mixed with contrarianism are potent drugs, but cars are the perfect case against things not changing, positive change has accelerated the last 20 years.

The main point though is that you don't accomplish more. You get from A to B in about the same time. How much you like the experience does not change that there is not really a difference in the outcomes.

I find it regrettable that sooo many comments focusing on "like" rather than actual hard results. The original topic is about the latter, not about the subjective experiences. And for results, a 1960s care got you from A to B pretty much the same as a 2022 one.

That does not make the subjective aspect invalid, but I would at least like to see some self-awareness in comments that we are talking about at least two separate things, and arguments for one are not useful for the other.

Recently I also found myself thinking about another aspect. It was when I looked at the tram station not far form my house, which for a year or so has been upgraded to have a display with the expected arrival times of the next three trams.

It sure is very convenient! However, compared to a similar transport system of fifty years ago, which achieved the same thing, we now have a lot of additional effort to maintain such infrastructure. It got waayyyy more complex, all the electronics, and software has to be written and maintained, screens installed and maintained, computer infrastructure - all just for some slight improvement in convenience.

Is it worth it? I have no conclusion, I just have to think about that when I hear yet another "we need more 'Fachkräfte'" (skilled workers). How many people do we need for mostly just minor convenience upgrades?

Sure, the transport system also can get more efficient with things like those displays. But here again, A LOT of additional effort, planning and thinking has to go into it for such gains to not just be theoretical. If we can afford it - sure, why not.

It's just that I have to think about the challenges ahead: The more stuff we produce and have to use energy on the worse for climate change and resource use.

I think it is good when new stuff is tried, but I have doubts that all those many minor "upgrades" are worth spreading so far. The effort for minor gains is gigantic, and we don't have free power, overabundance of skilled workers and free (material) resources (yet?). How much worse would for example said city tram system really be with less sophistication and IT?

I've become a bit skeptical about my own line of work. IT is nice and all and I love it, but it also takes a lot of effort to prepare and also to maintain. Here took, too many only look at the gains, which of course do exist. But there is a bias "newer and more complex is better" IMO.

Very much related:

"Humans solve problems by adding complexity, even when it’s against our best interests"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/04/16/bias-prob...

Nature (paywall, try Sci-Hub): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00592-0

> Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving

> A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.

I think our economic and financial system is an additional driver. Not doing something is "being lazy" and is punished (unless you are wealthy already). If you manage to sell stuff that is useless or even detrimental, you are fine, and there still is a wide gap between this and doing something criminal.

It looks to me like our own biases and our society and systems push us towards increasing complexity just for complexity's sake. Then come the biases that let us find the justifications but not see the downsides nearly as clearly. We also have a huge bias for measurable/quantifiable outcomes, and what things with an attachment to money.

All this complexity relies on huge supply chains also for maintenance. Given the possible issues ahead, both political and climate, maybe less complexity and more locality and less international-network requirement might be a good idea.

What a horribly myopic take, it completely changes the "outcomes".

I am way more productive and happy:

- I save more money so I have more to spend towards productive uses.

- I don't die as often, living is productive.

- I listen to podcasts, diverse videos (just listening) or music, learning more during my drive.

- I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more.

- The car drives for me, leaving me more relaxed and energized when I reach my destination, and I am more likely to travel further than I would normally.

- The car is much safer, lowering anxiety, so I use it more often for productive uses and generally feel safer and happier, and therefore more productive.

- It accelerates and coasts at higher speeds easily, so I get there faster.

- My back doesn't get sore nearly as easily (I get back pain easily sitting up), a huge productivity boost.

- The AC is cooler and heat is faster, sound is nicer, every material is nicer, tint is stronger, wipers are automatic and fast, lights are automatic and fast, etc etc - all this adds up to lower stress and higher safety, meaning less death, less injury, higher likelihood to use it productively, and less stress.

To wave away these things as minor is a very Thiel-like thing to do, but I find it ridiculous. You want to go to space? To be in the most inhospitable environment possible? What does that do for us, again?

I'd rather have better Wifi and more legroom on a flight than a rocketship that went 2x faster but didn't have either. We didn't get flying cars, we got unlimited knowledge and communication at the speed of light, even when flying through air. I'd like to fly a car, but again:

Cars from then 2020s are spaceships compared to cars from the 90s, while cars from the 90s are not really much different than those from the 60s. Within a decade we likely have self-driving electric cars completely dominate, and suddenly the Theilians look silly because all these "non-important" advances like, oh, computers and AI, suddenly solved a big problem, ignoring the fact that those same computers are already solving medical problems left and right, landing rockets from space, folding proteins, re-inventing Chess and Go, saving millions of man-hours of work, connecting people all over the world and greatly enhancing their general knowledge, amongst a few hundreds of other things.

To get to your conclusion you ignore 99% of what my comment si about and concentrate on a single thing, cars. I don't like these kinds of arguments where people carefully select one minor thing and pretend it's the main point. I wrote about quite ab bit more, and cars were not even close to the center of my post!

> I call friends and family, enhancing connections and communicating more.

I also question the validity of statements such as these. It does not seem to me to be supported by evidence that our connections between people - and lets concentrate on connections between already connected people to remove the question if new tech lets us make new ones more often - are qualitatively better than in the past. I would think such a statement very much deserves a [Citation needed] response. I think a lot of your statements are equally... creative and subjective, or worse ("I don't die as often, living is productive.").

Sorry, I use a phone to look up transit info and it's 100x more convenient.

There's a massive and tangential discussion to be had about tech and it's influence on culture and connectivity, but that's not for this thread.

> Sorry, I use a phone to look up transit info and it's 100x more convenient.

I'm a bit baffled, what does your reply have to do with either of my previous comments? I mean what I actually wrote, I'm aware I prominently mentioned such a convenience feature. It's just that there was no question that it was convenient.

It's a direct response to this:

> It was when I looked at the tram station not far form my house, which for a year or so has been upgraded to have a display with the expected arrival times of the next three trams.

> It sure is very convenient! However, compared to a similar transport system of fifty years ago, which achieved the same thing, we now have a lot of additional effort to maintain such infrastructure. It got waayyyy more complex, all the electronics, and software has to be written and maintained, screens installed and maintained, computer infrastructure - all just for some slight improvement in convenience. Is it worth it? I have no conclusion, I just have to think about that when I hear yet another "we need more 'Fachkräfte'" (skilled workers). How many people do we need for mostly just minor convenience upgrades?

You made up some arbitrary thing that you admit improves quality of life, and I pointed out that your example doesn't really even capture the difference. 40 years ago you had to ask around, or call to ask about the times of tram. Now you can find the exact times, delays, of any tram anywhere directly from your tiny pocket supercomputer. The difference is so stark, and yet you focused on signs at the station when the revolution was in your hand.

---

Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing. I don't owe you to refute every point you put out, the thread here was a specific example of tech improving productivity, and I think it's definitive.

The study is ridiculous and proves nothing, and the rest is pathos and too broad to reply to.

> It's a direct response to this:

I still don't see how the reply fits to the comments I made. You missed the point of my example by miles, is my impression still. I think I already expressed it well enough even in the original comment, so I have no idea how to re-express it for you.

> 40 years ago you had to ask around, or call to ask about the times of tram

No you didn't. The train or bus schedule was and still is posted at each station, and pocket watches have been a thing for a very long time. I find your style of a bit tiring to be honest.

> You made up some arbitrary thing

Even more misrepresentation! I did not make up anything! That happened!

> Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing. Realizing you brought up like 5 different things, and now every time I refute one you're motte and bailey-ing to the next thing.

You keep ignoring my point and keep talking about deliberate misrepresentations of some minor examples that merely serve as illustration!

> The difference is so stark, and yet you focused on signs at the station when the revolution was in your hand.

Given what the parent comment is about, the really huge difference e.g. between tech such as gas lights and electricity, or horse carriages and modern transport, your claim of a "stark" difference seems unjustified to say the least. You still get from A to B in about the same time and with at best a minor improvement in efficiency and convenience. It is certainly not a game changer to have computerized timetables compared to paper schedules plus watches and clocks, unless a transport system is so grossly broken that it barely ever runs anywhere close to the posted schedule.

I see no basis for you claims of "stark difference" and "revolution", given the context of this entire discussion. The Internet and computerization are, but not replacing paper tram schedules with electronic boards. Again, unless your experience is from some place where the paper schedules were completely useless and trains and buses ran randomly and you had huge random wait times. In which case they would still be far better off fixing their broken transport system so that the schedule actually has meaning.

> I don't owe you to refute every point you put out

You keep "refuting" what there never was to begin with. For example, as if I had said "there is no benefit" (of changes), a point I never made.

Never once did you even acknowledge (or ever even see?) my point, which is the position in a larger context. You keep attacking positions I never took. I will not repeat them here, since I already mentioned them in my original post.

> The main point though is that you don't accomplish more

You said this is your main point, and I directly replied to that.

Another point you made was that electronic signs at trams aren’t an improvement. I agree! Wholeheartedly. I mean showerheads haven’t improved either! We could list all sorts of things that either haven’t changed or that aren’t improved by tech. But that would be silly.

You in fact have avoided the very valid point I made in reply to that. Electronic tram signs are a red herring. The revolution is in your pocket. I can check flights, trams, buses, anything in about 15 seconds anywhere in the world. That is a huge productive improvement.

Anyway it’s clear this convo isn’t going well, but glad we had it. I very much got your other points, I just didn’t feel them relevant to the article or this thread, it’s a whole other conversation on simplicity or satisfaction, not really productivity. You can see one of my sibling replies for what I think about it.

> > The main point though is that you don't accomplish more

> You said this is your main point, and I directly replied to that.

You don't refute my statement. You still only get from A to B in about the same time. It's just slightly more convenient. But if the schedule is actually kept by the trams it's not even that, you can just look at the posted paper schedule at the station. The difference in convenience then only is that you have to walk a few steps to see the much smaller print.

I never disputed the utility of GPS. Although there is indeed the disadvantage of using it too much, having lived long enough in the pre-GPS time using maps and/or trying to use just my brain to find my way felt good in different ways, and I still use that method when going somewhere where the journey is the goal itself. It's like when one of my flight instructors covered up all the instruments and got me to fly by sight - including things like angle of attack, at least in level flight (yes that only works for small planes, large ones must be flown by the numbers and instruments, same with IFR conditions).

You still overlook all the larger picture things, the systemic stuff. A discussion so limited to only the thing itself instead of the system is useless in my view, and quite boring, more like trying to gain the upper hand in a discussion by selecting a limited scope and reading into the comment only as much so you can find some angle of attack, instead of using good will and really actually trying to see one's point. You began like that right from the very start, when you started your first reply: "What a horribly myopic take". Zero good will and insulting. AFAICS you keep looking for ways to "win". This is quite tiring.

Again in terms of productivity: safety (huge), money savings (huge), literal speed (yes, it's faster A to B), productive activities possible during driving / due to the comfort of driving / due to tech like GPS (...huge) as... summarizing all that as "convenient" is disingenuous. I hope if you actually reply again, that you explain even just the massive safety improvements as not direct, concrete productivity improvements.

Also turning a smartphone with internet, realtime transit info, route planning, which can do it anytime in the future, anywhere on earth, and let you plan travel across any number of travel modalities (it shows me transfers between bus, train walking, weather along the way, etc) into... "GPS" is just a great example of myopia. And that's just scratching the very surface! For just the narrow, narrow use of travel, the phone solves whole entire large brick-and-mortar industries that used to exist like travel agents - remember, you used to go to a dedicated store to book travel? And trusted one person who actually didn't know much about anything? And they had like a few packages, and you browsed them in a low-res pamphlet? I mean really, travel is the topic you want to say hasn't improved, and your example is electric sign-posts? The, well, myopia in that is stunning.

But I worry even bringing in one extra point, because you've shown yourself to be the type who latches onto examples and reduces, rather than expanding. Remember - smartphones replacing travel agents in a 100x better fashion is but one of thousands of improvements it's made to transportation (Google search, Wikipedia, Tripadvisor, Uber, Getaround, Yelp, HotelTonight, Airbnb, online booking), which is but one of thousands of use cases it's done similar for.

Just my perspective:

I don't feel like I know my friends or family very well these days, despite being friends for almost thirty years with some.

Twenty years ago we would talk on MSN or email and arrange to do something or hang out. These days you just see photos of their lunch.

I also feel like a lot of folks are scared to hang out, even pre-COVID, because they have nothing to talk about that isn't already on Facebook. What they do discuss is pretty much solely consumption of "I ate x", "I bought y".

I largely feel like folks have lost the art of conversation. Instead they're now content creators.

My perspective is quite the opposite, people travel to see each other way more, video chat way more, and we talk about more diverse and interesting stuff.

They have more hobbies and more interesting hobbies (the internet has really exploded the ability to learn about and try things, and new tech like kite surfing is popular with my friends). My wife learned how to sew during the pandemic using just YouTube.

Very interesting! I've found that most people I know never really access the internet outside of Facebook. The idea of using a search engine is something academics apparently do. Seeing far fewer businesses with their own websites too, just telling people to follow them on Instagram or Facebook.

Virtually everything you mentioned has nothing to do with the point that was so eloquently stated by the above poster.

> The main point though is that you don't accomplish more

And I pointed out ~10 ways I do accomplish more because of it, refuting exactly the point.

The rest of the comment cites a ridiculous one-off, narrow social science study with a few vague pathic appeals to the quaint simplicity of the before-fore-times.

I think you both want to zoom way-way out to 10-guy "like, what does accomplish even really mean? Isn't simplicity, like, the real accomplishment?" and I'm all for a simple life well lived, but that's pretty much re-defining the entire discussion to be about something else. And no one is getting rid of cars or phones at this point, I'd love to see that argument.

You write to me on an internet-connected device, on a forum on the web, from likely a laptop or phone built within the last 5 years. That same phone you likely use all day, every day for hours a day. And you'll argue it's somehow a sinister regression? So... why are you here? A laptop, the internet (and modern healthcare that saves lives, modern cars that save lives, etc) doesn't exist without "complexity". It's such a ridiculous attempt to de-rail an interesting and specific debate.

It's also such a uniquely HN-specific type of person that pines for olden days while distinctly relying on modern technology all day every day, so weird. The same types will laud the Framework Laptop - yet talk about reducing complexity and supply chain reliance.

Laptops were much easier to maintain twenty years ago. The idea of a Framework would not be much of a novelty. Most decent laptops had swappable batteries, and both the RAM and CPU were socketed instead of soldered.

But let's see how well your 22 Outlander functions in 26 years. Also, if you were in a poorly developed, remote area with simple infrastructure and no fully-modern auto mechanic shops, then your lovely car breaks down. How would you handle that? The 95 4Runner would be a much easier car to deal with.

We often buy nice, comfortable, complex things with the assumption that the comfort and niceness of now as well as the infrastructure that lets them function well are static things that will never cease. Of course, they're not, and sometimes they can recede very abruptly.

Ok swap in a 22 Tacoma. You're arguing the specific when you should argue the general.

Your second point is shifting the entire conversation to something else entirely.

The point is not "how smooth your ride is" or "how nice your stereo system is" or what incremental bougie feature was added to standard cars in the ensuing 30 years. Fundamentally, you're not able to go anywhere with your 22 Outlander that a 95 4Runner wasn't able to go. You're not able to get anywhere quicker. Ok, manufacturers started caring about quality again after functional obsolescence faded away due to consumer tastes and competition.

These are all iterative changes. You still stop at red lights. You still sit in traffic. You still have the same speed limit as everyone else. While someone from the 90s airdropped into 2022 would be impressed with the stock features of a '22 car, they would not experience any fundamental shift in the movement of goods and people. We still using the same barges, shipping containers, trains, cars & highways, and jets that we were back then.

It goes much faster (acceleration and confidence at high speeds), using half as much gas, at least 2x safety, while able to be more way productive while I drive, if I choose to (I mean I can call video call anyone at any time - show that to someone in the 90s and their mind would be blown). The car stops for me if I forget to stop behind cars, and it auto drives even in traffic, even to a stand-still in bumper-to-bumper.

Having just done two 12+ hour road trips, each, in both cars, I can say that it's not the same. The 4Runner I arrive tired, angry, back hurting, and dizzy from focusing on the road every second, having spent way more on gas. With the new car, I basically enjoy podcasts and movies on my dash while keeping an eye on the road and it does the rest.

We literally have mostly automated driving while turning cabins into ultra-premium dens filled to the brim with every comfort from massage to heat, and people claim it's not tangibly different. It's so, so different.

Even lives saved due to all the safety features and hardware is like hundreds of thousands of human-years of productivity. Reducing it down to "technically they go the same speed" is a silly game to play, I can reduce any opposing argument down in a very narrow and specific way and "win", but that's not the game.

I stand by cars being a great example of progress, and again we're talking velocity of change - compare 1968 car to 1995 cars to today, and it's not really debatable which one is a bigger leap.

Finally, this bits vs atoms is stupid. It's another arbitrary way of slicing things to win an argument. But even if we did want to cut out computers, phones, AI, high speed internet, etc - which we totally shouldn't - you only have to look to SpaceX, or all the crazy new manufacturing tech like industrial 3D printers and AI-powered robotic arms that are actually driving all the innovation in things like cars.

> If you missed a turn, god help you.

People had lots and lots of paper maps. Every gas station had a rack of them. You'd probably have had a good spiral-bound one of your entire region in your car. Wrong turn? Just check the map and save God's help for later.

Eh, everyone I knew got lost and then tried to figure out where on the paper map they were while trying to not get into an accident.

GPS, you just wait a second for it to update and you barely miss a beat.

Yeah, sounds true enough.

This sounds like poor navigation skills to me. You should be able to find out roughly where on the map you are purely by dead reckoning.

So maybe if we by "productivity" mean "can get away without acquiring useful skills" then sure, "productivity" has definitely gone up.

How would that skill be useful to me? I’ve never needed it in my entire life. You sound like a Luddite.

I think this is a risky side to take. Consider that your argument isn't all that far from a kid wondering why they should learn math. After all if they ever needed to use it, they could just use a calculator, like the one they bought from the clerk who whipped our her trusty calculator to determine how much change to give for the 120 coin calculator that was paid for with 200 coins.

Navigational skills are likely not only improving our mind in ways we might not otherwise appreciate, but also serves a countless practical scenarios. Something as simple as getting around at a large market or mall often comes down to the exact same skills as reading a map. In fact that is what you're often literally doing as you find a floor map to locate the location you'd like to go to.

There are also examples on the other side. Read this [1] warning from the national parks service about GPS and Death Valley. Multiple people blindly following GPS there have lost their lives because of it, and countless other similar locations that are quite remote and where what your GPS tells you, and what reality tells you may often contradict.

Finally, if we ever enter into a war against another major power - on day one of the war, all GPS is going to cease to exist for the foreseeable future (with the internet not far behind). Those satellites are sitting ducks and are going to be high priority targets. This shouldn't even be an argument, but this scenario is looking increasingly likely with every passing day.

[1] - https://www.nps.gov/deva/planyourvisit/directions.htm

> Consider that your argument isn't all that far from a kid wondering why they should learn math. After all if they ever needed to use it, they could just use a calculator, like the one they bought from the clerk who whipped our her trusty calculator to determine how much change to give for the 120 coin calculator that was paid for with 200 coins.

Well yes, it’s exactly like that argument, and they’re both valid!

Oh, when is this GPS ending war coming? Also, I didn't realize I had scheduled a tour of Death Valley, when was that again?

I used to be a (literal) boyscout. I spent a lot of time camping in the backcountry of Death Valley (Butte Valley) before it got closed off, and even more in the Utah Badlands. I got my orienteering patch, and also wander around A LOT in the wilderness (legit, no cell phone, poor GPS stuff) to this day. And I don't always bring a GPS or a phone.

It's been over 2 decades since I got lost outdoors (and then only for about an hour), but I do sometimes get lost in a complex urban environments. Which street goes where again? Especially when I'm on a continent I haven't been on for awhile. I've been told I have an excellent sense of direction.

I also grew up before hand held GPS was a thing, let alone smart phones.

Even back then, almost no one had a decent sense of direction, people got lost and delayed getting to new places all the time, etc. If you asked someone which way was North, at least 75% of people would have no clue or thought they knew and then pointed the wrong way.

The way people dealt with it was by NOT GOING TO NEW PLACES MUCH, or by bringing someone who had been there before, or just being late a lot the first few times.

I also think it's dumb to suggest someone be trying to juggle a (usually outdated) paper map and orient themselves that way, ESPECIALLY in traffic with little notice, instead of just using GPS. And if you think people are going to be able or willing to pull over somewhere to pull out the map and look, well, go watch what people actually do in traffic now and tell me again. A lot of people don't seem to be willing to even go to the next freeway exit when they miss theirs, preferring to rampage across dividers instead.

It also used to be people would bring someone along to be the navigator because it was so difficult. Now people can explore on their own easier.

In the event of a war and GPS gets taken out, solar apocalypses, etc. it's going to suck for that and many other reasons, but it's not like it helps suggesting they use the old terrible way in the mean time. Because even on a good day, that was pretty terrible.

Why is that not an appropriate form of productivity?

And I've never seen somebody who learned to navigate on a map effectively actually locate their position in moments.

I'm not talking about cold starts, to be clear. I'm talking about the situation where "one minute ago I was here, and I have moved at roughly this speed in roughly this direction for that minute. Where's the centre of the small circle I'm probably in now?"

If someone knew where they were (with any decent certainty), they wouldn't be lost.

Everybody should keep a spiral bound atlas in their car. The dependence we are all discussion on GPS will be _really_ painful in the event of a crisis when your cell service stops working and you can't find your way home from 2 miles away.

> Just check the map

Ah yes, “just” check the map. When I was a kid if my Mom made a wrong turn on a way to a doctor’s appointment a few counties over (I got sick a lot as a kid) I’d have to reach under my seat and figure out which of the multiple paper map books corresponded to where we were. Until GPS I had no visual sense of “where we were” when we were out of my town (I don’t understand the “relying on GPS makes you worse at navigating” people), so I was basically useless at reading or interpreting the maps. Mom would need to pull over, but that meant finding some way to get off the unfamiliar highway we’d just turned onto, which could take a few minutes (or more, if the exit we took put us on another highway).

So now we’re several minutes off course, flipping through the pages in this other county’s map, trying to figure out how to get to a doctor’s office in a building whose parking lot has a one-way entrance that’s in the back, but first we’re low on gas and need to find a gas station that hasn’t closed down since the maps were printed.

And then suddenly, we got this GPS thing, and this awful fixture of my childhood was gone. “Getting lost” just stopped being a thing around the mid-2000s. Screw the 1950s, 1990s me would find the current status of driving to be an unimaginable utopia.

Ok. So you were a child and not good at reading a road map of an area near your home to locate a physician that you visited frequently. The vast majority of society managed to navigate using paper maps for centuries with little fanfare.

GPS maps are an improvement not a major innovation, which is the main point. They are more convenient and require less skill, but they are functionally a paper map with a dot on it that changes based on your location.

Finding a gas station in an unfamiliar area, however, is definitely improved by a GPS map. So, you can now run the fuel tank down a little further before filling it up. Nice, but again not revolutionary in my opinion.

"...reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing cabinets..." were all nicely curated. Today the signal to noise ratio is extremely bad.

It's more productive having somebody show you how to do something, than trying to learn it yourself. Perhaps in the 1980s when the economy was going better, it was easier to connect with people willing to share, teach, mentor. Perhaps people have been forced to be more competitive now. Also, cut back in education meant many programs have been cut.

We would not feel so stagnant if manufacturing was more of a thing in N. America. Lots more factories with lots more 3d printers, laser cutters, drone, robots would exist. If you needed to get your hands on some such tool, you'd only have to ask around. 3D printers didn't penetrate the home like desktop publishing did in the 1980s and 90s.

What is the point you're trying to make here? That somehow people were better off for having to spend hours thumbing through books instead of searching things on the Web?

The fastest way of learning something is to have a professional teach you. Not even the Internet can beat that. Because of cut backs to education, we have fewer good mentors. Because of loss in manufacturing in N. America there are fewer skilled professionals to pass on their knowledge.

Plenty of professionals are out there teaching on youtube. I can fix my car, my plumbing, my electrical, I can frame an addition to my house, I can setup an irrigation system. Rebuild a chainsaw, build my own furniture, refinish my floor, fix my drywall, concrete flatwork. These are all things I've done in the past year. The proliferation of digital video, high quality cameras, microphones and editing software has made it easier than ever to learn from professionals. Books just aren't the same thing.

This entire thread feels borderline ridiculous.

We have all the internet but damn even books are better and broader today. I can order that rare special indy book and print it on demand and have it show up in 3 days

There are a lot of how to guides. Anything requiring a longer attention span or curated lesson is not promoted by the algorithm or facilitated well online. I mentor developers on a regular basis. Unless they need a book to get foundational knowledge or a recipe on how to make something very specific, I teach it myself because there's no adequate YouTube tutorial.

There's also no YouTube tutorial to tell you something like "don't mix types of metals for you gas plumbing or you'll kill your family" because there's no professional watching you make stupid mistakes.

I have books on math from encyclopedias from parents from the 80's weighting more than 4 KG each.

Now I can just fire up a browser and understand a hard math concept in minutes in a much easier way. With free as in freedom CAS tools and such, and with a netbook bought at a ridiculous price 20x cheaper than the book volume set itself, which back in the day costed A LOT.

Because of cut backs to education, we have fewer good mentors.

What cut backs? We spend more on education than ever. We might be getting less out of it, but not for lack of spending.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.70.a...

You are making several big logical jumps here that I don't think are connected. This sounds more like a dinner table conversation among some conservatives validating each other's worldviews than a constructive discussion point.

There are arguably more opportunities now for learning things from a professional than in the past.

Public schooling has very rarely been about mentorship anyway. Arguably higher education always was to some extent, but it very often still is; you end up in debt nowadays, but it's still widely accessible.

And I don't see what loss of manufacturing has to do with anything. Some of those manufacturing jobs were in skilled trades, sure, but there are still plenty of opportunities still to learn skilled trades. And even then, I don't think that has much of anything to do with learning things from a book at the library vs. a course on the Web.

With regards to books, this is such a weird take - high quality, well curated books had (and have) such a density of good information, that a stack of paper had all the information you could possibly look on a given for in a concise, reliable manner.

For example, when I tried picking up electronics as a curious high-schooler, I managed to pick up a clearance sale copy of The Art of Electronics - it had all the information I could possibly look for (and I'm pretty sure once could make a career in Electrical Engineering using nothing but that book as a source even today). I'm pretty sure I'd be hard-pressed to find such an accurate and comprehensive reference on that topic anywhere on the internet.

> I'd be hard-pressed to find such an accurate and comprehensive reference on that topic anywhere on the internet

You can find The Art of Electronics on the internet... And you can put it on an old tablet with dozens of other reference books.

However, you can’t read it without electricity to charge the battery and an internet connection. The device you read it on distracts you with notifications, emails, and other communications. You cannot easily scribe notes in the margins or easily flip between two pages that have related information. The device you read it on costs $1000 and must be replaced by every few years due to operating system obsolescence. You cannot read the book in bright outside sunlight on the device. The site that you purchased the book from goes out of business or the link to the book is broken or the site is down preventing access to the book. You drop the device and it breaks, while dropping the book is typically not an issue.

$1000? Try $100 for an Android e-ink device. No notifications, WiFi is only on for 10 minutes from enabling to preserve battery life.

Furthermore, plenty of stores sell you files to consume however you want.

Oh and e-ink works fine in sunlight and lasts weeks without charging. And FYI, there's plenty of notetaking systems.

My partner and I have been using these e-ink devices for almost five years. Works fine. No replacement required thus far. It is a specialized version of Android.

Art of Electronics is the EE Bible, has been updated a couple of times everything is googleable now though that I generally get the answer quicker that way, same as my ide, pressing F1 generally gives me the answer but google also does it and in the context of the problem I am having so that is definitely a +1 for newer technology.

> that a stack of paper had all the information you could possibly look on a given for in a concise, reliable manner

The World Book entry on enormous subjects of great importance was still maybe a few pages long. Today, a fair amount of primary source material in archives on different freaking continents is available online.

Printed documentation for hardware and software was frequently not exhaustive and there was no way of asking for help quickly. Maybe you had a help line. Maybe you knew hobbyists in a local meetup group. But that old DOS manual wasn't anywhere near as useful as what is available today.

For me the navigation example is a bad one because I still navigate like 30 years ago. I also don't have internet on my phone other than Wi-Fi. I don't want to be connected all the time.

What I see is that people have no clue anymore about where they are. They rely on GPS. Is this an improvement? As long as GPS is working, yes.

Oh come on, maps had been a thing 30 years ago, just not digital. General availability of the internet on the other hand was a real revolution, GPS too, but such revolutionary events are still pretty rare (e.g. I don't count the mobile phone as such a revolutionary jump because it "just" combined things into the same device that were separate before).

> 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 read something along the lines of 'a stock 2020 Camero is faster than a 2000 Ferrari' with fewer cylinders

Most name brand supercars are just dumping fuel into the engine and making it sound impressive. They don't have the engineering prowess to develop a refined power train like a big manufacturer. Nowadays emissions regulations force them to team up with a more competent player which is why the least sucky Huracan is the R8.

My house was built in the early 60s, has hardwood flooring throughout, copper plumbing, the wiring is all in hard conduit, the 2x4's are actually a bit thicker than today's, and of a higher grade. The original windows are still functioning, though not as efficient as modern ones. The appliances are modern because they've all been replaced.

Today's house in the same region uses lower grade lumber, carpeted floors, Romex, and plastic plumbing.

Agreed about the Corolla. I owned a second hand 80s Corolla, and it was the best car I had ever experienced up to that point, but a second hand Corolla would be so much better today.

You can still get those things from your 60s house, it will simply cost more (adjusted for inflation).

But I do not see how quality of life are any worse with LVT flooring instead of wood, or PEX plumbing instead of copper, or wiring in a hard conduit instead of not wiring in a hard conduit. I would even say quality of life is better. Why would I want to wax wood, and have a more difficult to repair floor. An LVT piece gets damaged, I just pop it out and put a new one in.

Effectively, advances in materials technology has made a home cheaper, and better in my opinion. I would buy a random 2022 house over a random 1960s house anyday.

Homes today are cheaper than the 60s? The 60s where a single earner family, where the earner was a schoolteacher, could afford a house before having kids?

The materials for the home are cheaper (adjusted for increase in quality/utility). For example, insulating a house to the same level is cheaper today than in previous decades. Same with the plumbing and flooring and many other advances where plastics technologies made a lot of things cheaper and safer too.

Land in certain locations of course a different matter, as well as labor.

There's no way the run-up in housing prices is all land. In 1960 the average house price was 11,700... about 115,000 in 2022 dollars. I'm 51 and have built several houses. Since I was 22 and started being interested in real estate, the rule of thumb was 20% land, 80% house for the value of a new build. That means the average house in 1960 (no land) was probably about 98,000 to build in 2022 dollars.

The average house size in 1960 was 1200 sqft, so call that $82/sqft in 2022 dollars.

The US average cost to build a new house in 2021 was $124/sqft. Meanwhile, the construction workers building the house were getting paid on average $6933/yr ($67,700 in 2022 dollars) whereas a construction worker now averages $47,000/yr.

So the labor costs have gone down by 30%, but the price of the house has gone up by 51%.

The materials might be better or they might be worse, but they're sure not making houses cheaper.

The hardwood floors sound nice, but as far as I’m aware plastic plumbing is much more preferable over copper.

Need to fix a leak in a copper pipe? Get ready to weld and bend pipes. Need to fix a plastic pipe? Unscrew that section, and screw in a new one. No drama.

You can use sharkbite for easy fixes on copper.

Quality seems to go through ups and downs, probably in line with economic cycles and periods of scarcity. Here, houses built in the 20s and earlier were made with high quality lumber that is scarcely available these days. I notice that rebuilders and renovations of these old houses are careful to maintain the base wood layers even when they completely strip the facing and almost everything else.

Also, there are billions more people who demand wood for their shelter. Is it reasonable to expect that quality of wood, which I assume is almost purely a function of time, to maintain the same accessibility?

That wood doesn't exist any more. It's water under the bridge.

I'm not sure that billions of people build houses with wood. It's definitely an American thing, Europe not so much (bricks and concrete.) China is concrete. India? South America? Mexico? Africa?

Because they do not have ample wood, not even the lower quality type farmed in US/Canada today. More specifically, the supply of the type of old school high quality wood being talked about in previous comments from 1920s and whatnot would certainly be impossible to satisfy global demand. Which is also a big reason why it is not used now. You can get it, it is just extremely expensive.

Modern houses have PEX plumbing. It has some advantages over copper, e.g. it won't burst if it freezes. But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.

> But the main advantage -- it's less labor to install.

Another huge advantage is you can easily do plastic pipe plumbing yourself. You just need one clamping tool, that costs less than one hour of plumbing labour would cost. Plumbing with copper piping or steel pipes requires way more time, skill, and expensive tools.

PVC drain pipes are also simple to install correctly: a tape measure, a saw, and some PVC solvent cement is all you need for simple jobs.

PEX doesn't corrode like copper will. Depending on your local water this may not be an issue you notice, but one house I had it was an issue.

But will PEX harden over the years and eventually crack like most plastics?

Probably not - the plastics harden are a different type with different properties. The industry was burned with early plastics that did have problems and is paying attention to this. PE has been used in plumbing for more than 50 years with no problems, PEX should last even longer.

Assuming you follow directions of course: PEX has zero UV resistance and if exposed to the sun for a couple months will break down and be useless.

I have lived in "luxury" apartments lately and they're all filled with the cheapest possible materials. More "advanced" in that as much as possible things are build of engineered materials which end up being a sort of wood and glue foam which are definitely not meant to last.

“Luxury” is simply a marketing term and has no importance.

The relevant question is how do the cheapest materials today compares to the cheapest materials in the 1980s?

I dunno, spending $4000/mo in Mountain View, you tend to have a few expectations. (in other words, it is more or less impossible to rent anything of actual quality)

The garbage materials of today didn't exist nearly as much in the 80s so they'd have to have used at least cheap solid wood instead of sawdust foam.

That is related to supply and demand of land/housing units. I do not see what it has to do with progress or lack thereof in building materials.

You're paying $3999/month for the land and $1/month for the building materials. The luxury is that you probably chose Mountain View so you can bike to your office, which is more enjoyable than driving.

> garbage materials of today didn't exist nearly as much in the 80s

Most of the 80s homes I have looked at have plenty of garbage materials: wasn’t the 80s when polystyrene decorative mouldings started being popular? Polystyrene houses and leaky building syndrome are definitely an 80s thing, but crappy claddings[2] have existed since the 20s.

There are plenty of garbage homes made with a variety of different garbage materials in the decades before that e.g. ticky-tacky[1]. Different types of particle board have been around for a while.

Watch out for embedded asbestos fibre in stucco ceilings or external claddings especially before the 80s - that shit can really tank resale value because it is hideously expensive to remove (vendor doesn’t legally have to declare it {in New Zealand}, but at some point in the future I expect that will be required).

Cheap and terrible homes and apartments are built in any decade or century. The Road to Wigan Pier written in 1937 talks about the crappy old brick homes in the UK. Survival bias and “the good old days” can make us think old homes are better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes

[2] https://soundhomesnz.co.nz/what-type-of-cladding-does-your-h...

> Watch out for embedded asbestos fibre in stucco ceilings or external claddings especially before the 80s - that shit can really tank resale value because it is hideously expensive to remove (vendor doesn’t legally have to declare it {in New Zealand}, but at some point in the future I expect that will be required).

Best not to remove asbestos unless it is flaking and unpainted. Disturbing it is likely to make things worse. It lasts forever and has incredible insulative properties despite its toxic nature.

Almost all older homes (pre 1973 I think) have lead paint too with the same caveat to not disturb it unless absolutely necessary. Lead plumbing is a different matter and should be removed unless possibly it is a sewage pipe.

Resale prices are relative to other homes in the neighborhood. If all the other homes are old too, then they all have the same toxic building materials so no devaluation is likely.

> 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.

This is definitely not true. Old houses have solid lumber, new ones are lightweight softwoods. Copper pipes replaced with plastic. Maybe Marble kitchens are nicer? More energy efficient is likely. Certainly 30 something families can't afford big suburban houses like their parents/grandparents.

What utility does the solid lumber provide over the lightweight softwoods? What utility does the copper provide over plastic?

For lightweight softwood, I can at least think of the utility that it will be cheaper. And for plastic over copper plumbing, same thing, it will cost less, but it will also be more resistant to corrosion and easier to repair.

It serves the utility of not being able to hear people breathe on the other side of the home. Speaking as someone who grew up in old New England colonial houses, I'd say that if anyone wants to understand why Californians build so many tech products without privacy, one needn't look any further than the lack of privacy to which they grew accustomed in their homes.

That has exactly zero to do with the lumber. Nothing at all. In fact heavy dense lumber would transmit sound better than a light wood.

I have a new house built from this 'crap' wood you distain, and you can't hear people in the next room because it has sound deadening materials in the walls.

If your house has sound deadening material inside the interior walls, then you must have a custom built home. Almost all spec homes have nothing but air in those interior wall spaces.

If it is "definitely not true" as you claim, surely someone has done an analysis and published data on electrical, flooring, structural strength, etc. Lets see some of that. Data is easier to discuss than opinions.

Everything in modern home construction is about minimizing labor and material costs. That involves major cutbacks on quality as well. Whatever corner cutting a builder can get away with will be done.

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. :)

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.

> Before the internet we referred to TV as "the opiate of the masses"

No, that's religion.

That was only before TV. The expression originally referred to religion, but later referred to television. For example, see the citation provided to the July 15, 1957 issue of Time magazine.

Out in the more capitalism-loving parts of the country, it was just called the idiot box, the boob tube, etc.

The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy called it "the Drug of the Nation". The band was from the Bay Area. Does that qualify as a "capitalism-loving part of the country".

> 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?

It’s clear to me krugman never held a hammer in his life bc that is just laughable statement

Are there a lot more hammers now than in the 80s?

I think he's trying to say that while superficially a house may appear much the same as in the 80's, anyone who has hands on building experience would immediately recognize the difference in materials and construction techniques.

> anyone who has hands on building experience would immediately recognize the difference in materials and construction techniques

The point is that the differences are largely incremental. Same stick built frames, same flimsy building wrap, same poorly installed fiberglass batts.

None of that compares to the quantum leap that was indoor plumbing, in home telecommunications, automatic kitchen and laundry machines.

But it's also that such massive change happened prior to the 80s that afterwards we have focused more on optimizing than new categories in our houses. And optimizing isn't bad, it's just a different type of advancement.

Because the world runs out of quantum leaps at times.

In theory we can 3d print houses now, but those are not more useful than a stick built house. They are very easy to change and repair which a feature most people like. The building wraps these days have rather insane R values and do a good job insulating the house. And most houses have some kind of blow in for insulation.

> The building wraps these days have rather insane R values and do a good job insulating the house

Building wraps have almost no R-Value. The basic function of building wraps is to keep water out, which is why they are called WRBs (Weather Resisting Barriers). Some higher end ones also block air infiltration, but those aren't used very much.

For example, staple up house wrap doesn't block air the way it's typically installed, whereas fully adhered wraps do a much better job of that.

Some sheathing systems (not house wrap) like Zip-R have insulation value, but not "insane" by any means. The maximum R-Value Zip-R gets you is 12 (at a big price premium compared to alternatives), and the code minimum for 2x4 walls is 13.

In many climate zones that experience both extremes of heat and cold, it makes a lot of sense for homeowners to exceed code minimums for insulation, although it makes less financial sense for production builders who are trying to minimize their build costs.

Obviously he was referring to the existence of conveniences of the homes (dishwashers, laundry machines), not how they were built or the finishings. There have been very few big changes in how homes are built since that time.

A little more insulation, and they've gotten even bigger, but they are otherwise pretty static.

How is that obvious? Appliances are much better too btw but yeah if you ignore everything that changed then not much has

Ok, with unlimited power what would you change with your home?

I want a machine that can:

1) Identify any small parts (no need to try and remember what something is and if it is useful).

2) Sort things into boxes.

3) Give me a matching object (e.g. I want a screw with the right length/diameter/pitch).

I did change it. Some things were incremental (bomber air sealing and insulation) and some were quantum leapy (house wide heat recovery ventilation with smoke and particulate filtering, which was necessitated by the incremental advances).

The other quantum leaps are multiple electrical appliances participating in demand response programs that are helping to balance the electric grid from the demand side.

What I wish I could do (constrained by space, finances, or technology)

- Geothermal heat pump

- Vertical modularity

- Neighborhood microgrid

- Rainwater capture

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.

Much of that is consumption, though. I don't want to knock consumption, but it's not productivity.

Consumption is directly related to production. If I was willing to live on the minimum I could have retired after only a couple years. People retire at 65 now like before, but with a lot more stuff their additional productivity gave them.

People seem to like it, so the argument that they shouldn't have so much junk is a bit flat.

Is all that extra stuff making them happier? Or are they just acquiring it to keep up with their neighbours? Maybe someone who retired early on the minimum would genuinely be less happy, but only because of seeing how much "better off" everyone else was.

I don't have a huge amount of evidence for this (I suspect you do not for your claim either), but I would guess that yes, it does make people happier.

The stuff I own is not keeping up with the neighbours, it's stuff that is meaningful to my hobbies. I have a cupboard full of board games because that makes me happy. My friend has a cupboard full of kitchen equipment because that makes them happy. My other friend has a basement with a home gym, my other friend has a mountain of books, and another friend has lovely furniture.

Which all implies that we're not really trying to keep up with each other, because if we were, we'd now be competing in completely different races. And even when I meet people with a similar interest to me (e.g. board games), the wealth and variety of the medium means that we'll probably still have very different interests within the world of board gaming.

So it logically seems to me that, if anything, the era of social competition is waning because people are more willing to accept that they want different things to their neighbours.

Yes it makes them happy. Not just the consumption itself, but the act of earning it, and the competition is what some people live for.

Maybe your values are different, but those people don't understand your values any more than you understand theirs

What things do you do at home that you would count as productivity? I'd say dishwasher and microwave would be much more common today than in the 80s. Clothes washing machine probably not more common but today's would be brighter, beepier, more economical on power and water and with better chemical detergents. Power Showers compared to waiting for an immersion heater to heat a hot water tank, maybe, high power transistors seem to be more of a thing than in the past. Portable Li-Ion power tools could improve DIY productivity for people who do that kind of thing. Battery portable vacuum cleaners and Roombas?

Is that about it? You can't "productivity" sleeping or oven baking or raising children or relaxing or socialising or a lot of household living experiences. You can productivity your paper work, insurance, banking, but that's screen based. Once you've got clothes from a hand wash to a machine there isn't much pressure for it to be very fast compared to kinda slow, since you aren't hanging around waiting.

All fair considerations, but I think the main point is a matter of degree between the two time periods. Surely there were also less visible efficiencies that took place during the first period too, i.e. the electric fridge vs. an ice box, but that's not the point of the comparison, I think.

Also, homes in the US are generally FAR better insulated than they used to be, especially windows.

How about money?

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.

Honestly the change is pretty small.

Up until at least the mid 90s everywhere took checks. Honestly today interacting with the cash register at CVS takes longer than writing a check.

Sure, a 30 second check writing reduced to a 10 second tap to pay can be a little bit of an improvement (except when it doesn't work), but really it's not that much better.

May you be the luckiest person on earth if the people in front of you only took 30 seconds.

Today's "I have a coupon on my phone but I can't get cell service here" guy is honestly far worse than "slow check-writer" guy.

> Now, what's the productivity measure in that? I have no idea.

Bordering on nothing, I think, other than that we have the opportunity to make street robbery much less lucrative if we stopped artificially inflating the price of phones, because people don't have to carry cash any more (if they're content with each purchase being recorded and data mined by 20 different companies and their government's intelligence agencies.)

Burglary rates have dropped precipitously with cheap big screen tvs and cheap audio players. My dad built his entire young life around putting together his very expensive stereo system, I have a single dirty old bluetooth speaker that sounds nearly as good. Being not worth stealing makes it even better.

Oh money...

We can't even do international banking properly. There is literally a list of countries I can't do 'normal' wire transfers to or get from without complicated hoops or huge waiting times and fees.

There is a huge list of things I can't pay for with credit card. I am not even allowed to open a shop selling dildos without getting a highly specialized and expensive credit card middle man. I had to stop several projects because I couldn't find a payment processor that was accepting low volume clients. Strengthening the monopoly in some niches.

If holidays fall weird a wire transaction can take days. 5 days is my recent record. This should be normal in 2022?

You can't just send any amount of money to anyone. High amounts can trigger bells and further complicate and lengthen transfers. We have literally lost control about our own money. In many countries it is already illegal to buy something expensive with cash.

So the productivity won for a credit card users is wasted somewhere else in this utterly complex system of payments & finances. If not a coder that bangs his head in frustration it is the tax office wasting human hours.

We have 'solutions' like Crypto, PayPal, Payeer but all come with their own issues and benefits.

It's funny to see all the replies missing the point. I agree there have been few "step changes" in the way we do things. The biggest real one I can think of is the capabilities of small motors, that enable things like drones and battery power tools. But not a step change, just an incremental improvement.

People had high hopes for mRNA, (no doubt people will take this the wrong way) but so far it seems to have been way overhyped. That kind of thing - the ability to arbitrarily protect against viruses - would potentially qualify.

Overall I think the world is in decline progress wise, even as we make incremental gains in previously discovered tech, we lose e.g. Concorde or moon landings or even open borders. And soon the availability of internal combustion engines to the masses if elites have their way.

Other than the neotlithic and industrial revolution, humanity has mostly languished. We could easily be in for more of that.

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)?"

Real progress requires largely-uninterrupted time, space and adequate resources, cannot be readily predicted and is inherently risky. By outsourcing higher thought to the private sector, progress without immediate commercial application has been grossly disincentivized and I would argue the prerequisite culture has been lost.

A 15-bit computer[0] brought us to the moon, whereas this time awash with 64 bit mobile supercomputers, infinite RAM, search engines and cloud computing has brought us high profile failures in corporate drone programs. In such an environment, cost is not the issue. In the private sector and public at large, perhaps we've forgotten how to work together. The military sector seems to have constant cost overruns and occasional big failures but at least gets the job done.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer

Yup, most of the talent has left, retired or flat out moved off of the area of research.

What I’m hopeful about is some new innovation happening in certain corners. Companies such as SpaceX, often made fun by people that are resentful as “Cowboys”, forget that the entire Apollo program was more “Cowboy” than anything SpaceX is doing today.

Read “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz if anyone is interested in the old school Cowboy culture of NASA. Warning: It might make you an optimist.

Tough choice between Soap and hot takes on HN :P

However, near-instant access to the entirety of humanities’ collective information vs a dishwasher? I’m fine washing dishes by hand.

Mapping a novel virus genome and formulating an RNA-based vaccine in mere weeks vs “look how many dams and bridges we can build”?

You know what happens when you compound incremental progress? Huge advancements.

Progress is real, and it’s only getting faster as exponential tech from the past few decades is just now hitting “whole numbers” and converging.

Of course, it’s not fundamentally inevitable, but the future is decided by the possible-ists.

Please take the time to read the latest works by Diamandis and Kotler, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, and Harari.

I cannot imagine your perspective will still be the same after so much history, theory, and real-world examples beyond the point by point counters you’re receiving as replies.

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.

Really a teriffic time period; Semmelweiss suggesting handwashing was just before it in 1847. Kamerlingh-Onnes work on Superconductivity in 1911. Rutherford splitting the atom in 1911. Modern 'safety' bicycle, 1876 and practical pneumatic tyres 1888. Lord Kelvin and the analogue computers predicted tides, 1872. Tsiolkovsky proposes space exploration by rocket in 1898 and liquid propellent in 1903. Just missing 1917, Gillies and the first modern skin grafts / plastic surgery[1]. Darwin and "On the Origin of Species", published 1859.

and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_invention... - Pasteurisation, dynamite, barbed wire, ballpoint pens, radio waves, x-rays, polyethylene, incandescent lights, Zeppelins, laminated glass, vacuum cleaners...

[1] https://www.oddee.com/item_98767.aspx

Someone from the Roman Empire would have had a good understanding of the world in 1750. Ocean travel better, some advances in building large buildings, otherwise not that different.

In 1900? Quite a bit has changed.

The general shape of daily life today is not so different than say 1970. Email instead of letters, cell phones instead of searching for dimes for the pay phone.

But we fly in jets that average about 450 MPH, cars with a top road speed around 60 or 70 MPH, television but now with an Internet or cable feed, supermarkets are much the same, etc etc.

> 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.

Exactly my thought. Why go over the ocean in hours when I can do it in milliseconds.

This is a tautological argument. Let's say computers didn't advance in the last 15 years - one could make the case they didn't get faster because they don't fundamentally do anything today they didn't do 15 years ago so we don't need them to be faster.

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).

I would absolutely choose a mobile phone over any of those things.

I guess if you'd choose a mobile phone over soap, then you're exclusively into virtual socialising rather real socialising.

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.

“huge” progress does not equal innovation. Being able to order a pizza in 60 seconds using an app is huge progress versus calling the store and ordering with your voice, but it is not a significant innovation. Now, printing a pizza using a digital recipe from a restaurant on my food printer would be something else.

huh? Progress requires innovation, the two are tightly linked

You could very easily tell by literally any of the other tech in the house. Roombas, Solar panels, space heaters, electric car. Or even by the the general utensils, encyclopedia, flooring, type of heaters.

Besides computers have changed the world just as much in the last 40 years as we have moved from horse carriages to cars, if not more. Just because it didn't require retooling of cities doesn't mean it isn't a giant leap.

Also the lack of certain things would be an indicator. No home phone. No phone books. No physical maps. Less likely to have a dictionary or other books. Fewer newspapers and magazines.

I do wonder really:given a choice between having a car and having internet, what would people prefer?

My guess is that many would prefer having internet access.

Heh, I recently sold one of my cars because of my ability to work from home.

Many more people, at least in the US are considered walkable communities than in the recent past.

Does my instant pot have a screen?

Not quite, but we have AI in rice cookers:

> The Pressure Induction Heating Rice Cooker & Warmer uses pressurized cooking and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to cook perfect rice. Platinum infused nonstick inner cooking pan helps rice cook sweeter. Pressure cooking helps turn beta starch into alpha starch for softer and easier to digest rice. Now with convenient Jasmine, Congee and Steel Cut Oatmeal settings.

https://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/npnwc

> 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".

> 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.

I don't think your comment does justice to how much we have advanced since 1960..

Today..

* we can have pretty much any food delivered to me with a click of a button

* We can have a ride at anytime to any destination with a click of a button

* Communicate instantly with millions of people with a click of a button

* Huge automation in business operations and logistics

* AIs that can literally draw pictures and write sentences

* Practically look at any place across the globe, find directions in any country and translate nearly any text to any language

* Listen to unlimited amount of music and entertainment with a tiny wireless thing in my ear that can also make calls

* Automated vacuum cleaners that run on schedules, mop floors and dispose their trash

* Cars that are much more efficient, can detect pedestrians, red lights, road signs, have blind spot monitoring, can warn you when you are drifting off, warn you if you risk collision, ..

* MRNA vaccines and breakthroughs in many areas of science (CRISPR for example)

* SpaceX, Starlink satellites and adoption of electric cars

* We literally have 3 rovers and 1 lander currently in operation on Mars, transmitting images and data

I could go on but I think I've made my point.

To claim that we have not progressed is ridiculous. Yes, we need screens and internet to accomplish some of these, but we also need fuel and electricity to build a lot of tech in 1960. Some technology simply require other technology and I think that point is irrelevant.

the bit vs. atoms thing is interesting though

We don't have the ability to regenerate someone's arm in real time or program it to become the limb of another animal in real time.

Teleportation, FTL, flying cars (anti gravity), consciousness transfer, 3D printed food from raw atoms, seamless BCID, direct matter to energy conversion, space elevator, real holograms, all those currently sci-fi/impossible things

plasma/laser/particle weapons which Nikola Tesla supposedly was working on back then but with miniaturized fusion energy sources maybe it'll be a thing (small cyclotron too).

active camouflage (cheap mass produced lcd display/camera overlaid on aircraft) haha name every sci-fi concept you've ever seen

I remember the first time I saw a helmholtz coil in action (bending glowing electron beam into a circle via magnetism) that was crazy but of course tv, even those tiny ones size of a walkman

Probably the main innovation is in how many people have access to those things compared to in the 1950s...

Sure, the rich people of the 60s had cars and dishwashers. Now many more millions of people do.

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.

I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your comment.

I'd add, though, that the entire complex of metrics we use to define "productivity" were invented to quantify and guide the improvement of things that were a problem 100 years ago

Of course the second 50 years were worse than the first 50 years, because if the people working during the first 50 years accomplished anything, then all the easy wins were taken.

And the problems being solved changed. If your entire population has moved on from the problem of producing enough to meet material needs, then of course the work being done now will score poorly. You need to update your metrics as fast as your technology changes, and we just haven't done that.

Everything you've described above is a real added value, but it's not the kind of value that the old metrics were designed to measure.

Classic case of grading fish by their ability to climb trees.

I am not convinced by this lengthy rebuttal, in fact it just solidified OP's point.

OP/Thiel's point: It's not that we haven't made any progress, but rather the progress since the cold war has been disappointing.

I'm a bit ambivalent about Globalisation and whether that can be considered progress. We globalized several times (Early trade routes, 14th century, British empire and then again in post-modern era).

thiel gave us a payments company, a shitty hedge fund and a government contractor doing consulting work. not to be reductionist, but his complaining doesn't register for me at all. for god's sake he tries to get people to quit Stanford to start businesses that necessarily can only coast on previous achievements, instead of doing science.

I never understood this kind of vitriol against Thiel. The media has been smearing his image because he didn’t fit into the mold of their political agenda.

I suggest listening to his interviews with a completely open mind and thinking on your own. I sometimes disagree with him but in no way he is evil/satanic as media portrays him. Sad.

This ad hominem doesn't change anything about the quote.

The home improvement stuff is huge. I just recently bought a home and talking to my parents about how they did home maintenance using printed materials was incredible. Compare even basic information like "learn to recaulk a shower" via a black and white book with grainy photos and 10,000 high definition videos of people doing it. Let alone a job of higher complexity.

> Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth

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.

Not just “so much better now!” but “incredibly super fantastically better than anything ever was or could have ever been compared to the horrible disgusting very bad, no good cretinous crud that came before!!!”. They shout so loud I can’t hear what they are saying. They sound silly.

Would be nice if the discussion focused on one particular point in the past, say 25 years in the past, 1997. What has dramatically improved since 1997 as a result of technological advances? It’s a much harder case to make, e.g. the first Prius was released in Japan in 1997, Windows 98 was in beta, Netflix was started…

https://www.computerhope.com/history/1997.htm

try to get your cancer treated in 1960 and let me know how much you like 2010

Cancer treatments are highly specific. There's been marked progress in some areas (breast, bladder), and remarkbly little in others (pancreatic, brain, lung).

A very close friend died of a cancer in the early 1990s for whom treatment has advanced little from the late 1960s, and is largely based on compounds developed in in the 1910s, for chemical warfare during the Great War. Other than genetic sequencing now telling us what specific chromosomal mutation is responsible for the disease, the situation remains largely unchanged to this day.

(This is one of the messages I continually send Past Me, who was as is all to typical, bombarded with "information" about "novel treatments" promising to aid in their disease. Those were, and are, utter bildge.)

The largest improvements in health outcomes, measured by decreases in mortality and increases in life expectency, occurred during the decades of the 1910s (women) and 1920s (men). The largest increases since have largely come about through improved healthcare access (especially to the poor and minorities, with Black women and men making huge increases in life exepctancy since the 1950s) and through te elimination of risks: air pollution, asbestos, lead, cigarettes, reductions in alcohol consumption, IV drug use, overdoses, unprotected sex, and the like. AIDs and other novel infectious diseases have been a counter-trend.

5-year survival for my friend's cancer was and remains about 1 in 5. 60 years after 1960.

You’re making it sound very simplistic but those screens are a whole new world that enable us to do an incredible number of things— from all the knowledge in the world at your fingertips, to very cheap and ubiquitous communication, shopping on demand, GPS, entertainment, learning, creativity from music to videos to graphics, simulations of real world situations etc. Our electricity is coming from renewable resources, there’s more social egalitarianism, countries across the world have gone from undeveloped world to much, much higher levels of development, air travel is significantly more accessible to everyone, we’re on the cusp of an general AI, space is more accessible, we can genetically modify our DNA and on and on.

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.

Why would I "take out all the screens"? Imagine if I walked into the average house and took out all the screws... why? That thought experiment speciously suggests that "the screens" are merely inert panes of glass rather than a core component of modern innovation. "Screens" function as an interface for many types of devices, they're not simply interchangeable because they have one.

David Graeber made a similar observation in one of his talks [1]. I find it very interesting and pertinent to the current difficulties humanity is currently facing, especially with regards to climate change.

One the one hand, humanity is totally capable of destroying our planet. On the other, we've already reached, so it seems, the limits of whats is physically possible. Both problems made us abandon reality and instead embrace virtual reality, and virtual "space time".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q84ar89Oxo

And to bring the analogy into the realm of computing, I feel like progress isn't lightning fast here either.

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.

In case of operating systems I often wonder what our GUI and workflow would look like if Windows, MacOS and Linux had equal market shares for the last twenty years.

Kinda like gnome shell :) the thing Windows 8 wanted to be and the heavy Facelifting apple is so afraid of.

Dall-E, AlphaGo/Chess is serious progress. Hyperfuturistic even.

> 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

But isn't that true of all innovations? That the earlier ones solve more basic/critical needs than the later ones? Would you trade a hot shower for glass in your windows? Or a plough that enables you face starvation less frequently?

> The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.

The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can do online many of the things you needed a car before. The speed difference is between minutes or hours to milliseconds - much more than the difference between cars and horses.

The whole aspect of looking at cars is funny. It’s like judging progress 60 years from now by checking by how much their resolution improved.

Telephones, video conferencing, and internet were available 30 years ago. It is just more available today due to the hardware improvements based on processors using instruction sets that have been around for decades.

Because a lot of technology is used for every more fine grained "control-freakery" that isn't really increasing productivity but creates more administrative burden.

The amount of reporting large corporates need to do today internally and externally would not be possible with 1950s technology, for example.

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.

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?

OK I’ll shut up.

RNA Vaccines too!

The above comments seem to assume that progress is limited to consumer goods.

As for progress in terms of atoms (rather than bits) behold the elaborate global supply chain.

So true.

Hardware/Physical innovation also takes 20 years delay "lab to fab" - you can't cheat it or speed it up. It simply takes time.

And more importantly: if you don't continuously (not continually) fund that 20 years of work (financially, human effort, etc.), the delay goes to infinity.

In general, that "pipeline" has emptied out in the US as manufacturing was outsourced overseas. And so anything you start today merely starts the 20 year clock but if and only if you have the infrastructure in place to support it.

> 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?

My robot vacs say yes, you can.

By the way, Neato’s robot vac regressed from its peak, completely autonomous models like Signature Pro from 10 years ago, to the cloud only lineups of today.

Sometime during the last 10 years was when data harvesting became more important than real consumer tech.

Peter Thiel and industry counterparts are directly to blame for consumer regression and the “world not changing much”.

Sorry. They don’t get a free pass.

I would trade my dishwasher for Google.

>The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.

You're about half as likely to die in a car crash as you were 30 years ago. It's incremental, but not hedonistic.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

> 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.

This is a good question, but I think you'd be surprised by some of the answers. I'd give up indoor toilets before I gave up my smartphone.

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.

> Technology is popularly misunderstood as "gadgets and lab science". But the root of the word is shared with technique.

Yes, and as you say, one is as good as another (given the same ROI). I remind myself of that by using the word 'tech' and, inwardly at least, repeating 'tools and technique'.

Well said!

Are your ideas from Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul#On_technique

Would appreciate some sources.

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.

We are doing useful things with them. The price of manufactured goods has plummeted, driven largely by automation and control. Maybe we don't really see that because first world cost of living has largely risen to match, driven mostly by housing and energy costs and healthcare. But in the less developed world, people can afford a lot more manufactured goods than they could 30 years ago. Which is at least partly because in absolute terms, those goods cost very little.

Sure, a TV 30 years ago was still "just" a rectangular screen, but if you lived in rural Slovenia, you still probably couldn't afford one. Now, it's probably still expensive to you to get a basic flat panel TV, but it's not as wildly unaffordable as it was - adjusting for inflation, TVs are 10x cheaper today then 1985. And this doesn't only go for electronics, loads of things cost less and are more available. The only things that might not be are things like raw materials and energy where supply, demand and other factors keep prices high over time.

For example aluminium was $0.60/lb in the 80s, now it's $1.40. This is actually a slight drop in price after inflation ($0.60 then is $1.61) but certainly not as cheap as you'd expect if the only factors were production efficiency.

Of course a lot of micros do end up in complete junk. Which is sad for a lot of reasons, not only the environmental costs but also the wasted human effort of designing the disposable Bluetooth-enabled dog toothbrush in the first place.

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.

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.

what you're missing is customer numbers. If you go from 20 servers to 200, and have 100x the customers, that's a massive win.

I'm not sure what part of my comment made you draw that conclusion. This was a science team and we used servers mostly for scientific computations. Sysadmins jobs was to operate and maintain the servers e.g. make jobs run, upgrade, patch, fix, etc.

Virtualization massively simplified this, and automation decreased human intervention. With 250 we were definitely running bigger tasks faster e.g. a project that required 3 months of computing now takes 2 weeks instead.

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.

> Saying they don't do anything new isn't right.

Perhaps it's possible that some people simply don't see the benefit of the newly added functionality, because they don't really use it?

For example, personally I'd be served perfectly well with something like LibreOffice, so from my point of view, all of these new solutions do not indeed do much new (that I'd benefit from) and sometimes do things worse (cloud based platform with all the drawbacks that come with it vs local software in open formats).

That's not to say that the point that you're making wouldn't be important, quite on the contrary - and even if the software doesn't do anything new, even in those cases one can make an argument for refinement being a worthy pursuit (as long as it's not a useless rewrite).

Perhaps text editing isn't the best example, given how different people's expectations can be in that regard.

> a person can write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word

That seems hard to believe; try printing, or formatting. It's like saying 'a person can fly just as well in a 1930s biplane or a current 737.' Sure, they both fly.

On the other hand, am I more productive in 2022 Emacs than I would be in 1985 Emacs?

As Robert Gordon notes in his The Rise and Fall of American Growht, an air traveller in 1936 headed from New York to Chicago, could have made the trip in 3h 55m gate-to-gate, vs. 2h 35m today. But in 1936, arrival at the airport need only be 10 minutes prior to departure, gates were immediately next to the terminal entrance, and taxis or a chauffeured Cadillac limousine were 5 minutes from the gate --- the latter cost $10.50 in 2014 prices.

The 2014 traveller must arrive an hour prior to departure, it takes 20 minutes merely to get off the plane on average (from the middle of the plane) on arrival, and 5--10 minutes to get to the taxi line. The net trip is only 20 minutes shorter than in 1936, despite the faster in-flight leg. Much more of that time is spent standing, waiting, or walking.

Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2015), pp. 396-7.

Good points. Still, there are imperfections in the argument: safety, availability (very few could afford that flight in 1936, if I understand correctly), range (NY to LA or London would be entirely different, etc.).

The range question was addressed by 1960.

Costs fell markedly from 1930 -- 1970. Far less so since.

It's popular to point to how much airline ticket prices have fallen since dregulation (under Democratic president Carter) in 1979, without also noting that 1979 was a local price peak driven by the Iranian oil embargo of the same year.

Safety has increased, of course. That's largely been a continuous function from the first days of flight ... with a curious exception in the first decade of the 2000s, where passenger deaths/mile fell markedly. (Also in Gordon's book.)

> Safety has increased, of course.

Come to think of it, security too. Hijackings weren't unusual news items in the 1970s; now, it's hard to remember the last one. And that partly explains the slower airport experience today (which is really due to nobody investing in the resources to speed it up).

> It's popular to point to how much airline ticket prices have fallen since dregulation (under Democratic president Carter) in 1979, without also noting that 1979 was a local price peak driven by the Iranian oil embargo of the same year.

A lot of those narratives are similar if one takes even a cursory look at the facts. As an aside (and IIRC), per the autobiography of former Fed chair Alan Greenspan, who was not a Democrat (and was a follower of Ayn Rand) and served in various roles under many presidents including Carter, deregulation began under Carter.

You're largely right.

Early air travel externalised numerous costs, and those have been internalised.

"Big Sky" air traffic policy was proved nonviable over the Grand Canyon (1956) and Park Slope (1960).

Bombings and hijackings of the 1960s and 1970s lead to increased departure-gate screenings. Those increased further after 2001.

Noise complaints lead to use of quieter high-bypass turbofan engines (with their own MAX failure modes).

Increased fuel costs in the 1970s also prompted higher-efficiency engines (again, high-bypass turbofans serve this role), as well as curtailment or cancellation of planned commercial supersonic transports.

Gordon also discusses similar apparent retrograde trends in automobiles. Here again I see formerly externalised costs (emissions, safety, handling, noise) being internalised and included in purchase costs. Electrification is a similar trend.

There's also quite a bit more people who travel by airplane today than in the 1930s. This adds complexity in trafficking, which works to slow things down, rather than speed things up. The fact that overall trip times are marginally faster, despite added traffic volume & complexity, largely explains things here.

But despite this, I mostly agree with the broader premise.

Gordon notes that air passenger miles are effectively an inverse relation to costs. Lower costs -> more passengers.

Total passenger miles have been largely flat since 2000. Total departures actually fell during the aughts, along with jet fuel consumption. Some of that's due to more efficient flight booking (appropriately sized aircraft, higher seat utilisation), though a large share is decreased seat pitch, which is to say, far less comfortable travel.

In case anyone is curious what "largely flat since 2000" looks like:

https://www.economist.com/img/b/1280/670/90/sites/default/fi... https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/16947.jpeg

Your first plot is of global, not US airline traffic.

Global incomes have risen, most notably in China.

I may have misread a chart or mis-remembered statistics. The Statista chart does show that the post-2000 trend in air travel is well below the 1990s trendline. Actual miles travelled would have been above 1 trillion had the former continued.

The more notable chart of Gordon's does indeed show price per passenger mile, not total miles (p. 401, Rise and Fall).

It's also often useful to think of travel not as miles but as time. Given an average train speed of about 30 mph, and aircraft of about 450 mph, the time per person per travel mode is nearly identical: 1.3 vs. 1.6 billion hours.

People take trains. They don't take them as far as they do aircraft.

Auto travel works out to about 12 billion hours, again assuming 30 mph average speed. That's about 10 minutes per person per day.

US Department of Labour seems to maintain statistics on modes of travel. Departments of Transportation and Energy may as well.

I've yet to find a good presentation of long-term trends.

You should instead ask " how long must a rich person show up before their flight"

I have not read the book, but from your quote selection so far it seems to mismanaged comparisons of the 1% to the 80% of the population.

If you looked at the poorer part of the population that things are generally much faster since they get to travel by plane at all.

The general public was flying en masse by the 1960s, though the pace picked up greatly through that decade.

Gordon's point is that the best commercial-grade service ... didn't move much in the seventy-eight years* from 1936--2014. It's been nearly another decade and that story's largely the same.

In a world which obsesses over Moore's Law and doubling improvements every 1.5 -- 3 years, no appreciable movement in 8 decades* is something to take note of.

Put another way, the 1936 experience was in a DC-3 (or similar) aircraft. The 2014 experience is in a turbofan-powered plane. It turns out that approaching the speed of sound is a pretty hard limit for most aviation --- commercial aircraft tend to max out at about Mach 0.85 or so. The laws of aeronautical engineering aren't going to move that much, at least not for reasonable quantities of fuel (hence: cost) and noise (externalities).

There's also the fact that other factors, call them "frictions", begin to appear: airport and air traffic congestion, security requirements, etc.

Even private-charter aircraft might find themselves further curtailed if they are utilised in, say, future terrorist attacks. Or find themselves vulnerable to attacks themselves in ways commercial aircraft are not. (This resembles a plot point in Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.)

Flights were five times more expensive in the period you refer to [1]. I would bet that the number of fliers increased almost proportionally. A significant part of this cost reduction is efficiency gains, with better, lighter airplanes that consume less fuel. Airplanes are also safer today. To call all that "no appreciable movement" is unfair.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-...

Noted, FYI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31500807

You wrote above:

> Gordon's point is that the best commercial-grade service ... didn't move much in the seventy-eight years* from 1936--2014. It's been nearly another decade and that story's largely the same.

The fact that total passenger miles has been largely flat since 2000 (is that even accurate? [1]) has no bearing on that claim. Furthermore, the number of passengers has basically tripled in the last 20 years alone [2], at the cost of some comfort certainly, but this also must count as efficiency gains. I mean, if we ignore an order of magnitude reduction in cost and increase in number of passengers, yeah, I guess the industry is the same since the Wright Brothers.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/185744/us-passenger-mile... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-...

There are two separate questions under consideration here.

One is the capabilities of commercial general aviation air travel in terms of total elapsed travel time.

The second is the general commercial utilisation of air travel.

In the case of the first, advances in aircraft speed have been all but entirely offset by increased frictions in other parts of the air transport system. 2014 travel between NYC and Chicago is only barely faster than it was over 80 years ago. Moreover, aircraft speed is flat or declining since the late 1950s and the introduction of jet-powered aircraft.

The cost side is based on economics and other factors. In part, it is a question of both supply and demand. Costs have fallen through technological efficiencies; jet engines of today are roughly as efficient as propellor engines of the 1950s, not merely faster as was initially the case. They've also fallen through nonaeronotical advances: more efficient booking, higher seating utilisation, tighter seating spacing, and the like.

Statista's data extend only to 2007. Gordon gives data to the 1940s.

Among the big surprises to me a few years back was that peak avaiation fuel (at least through the mid-2010s) had occurred by 2000. Total passenger miles increased, but only through much higher load factors.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1wo2hl/boeings... (Search for "aviation fuel usage data".)

http://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecast...

Gordon's data show inflation-adjusted passenger price per mile as essentially flat since 1990. Given miles travelled is a function of price per mile ... a similar relationship holds. Rise and Fall, p. 401.

> 2014 travel between NYC and Chicago is only barely faster than it was over 80 years ago.

Your issue is twofold: you are focusing solely on one metric to measure efficiency, arguably the worst one (speed), and you then further narrow the scope by saying efficiency gains must come from one dimension of the business ("aeronautical" advances).

There are obvious reasons for speed to not increase further, namely the speed of sound as you already mentioned, so this is a non-starter. We are simply not trying to make commercial planes faster anymore because that would be useless.

Regarding the second point, I think it is remarkable that you present data that directly contradicts your hypothesis and fail to realize that. If we are starting more flights, carrying more people and using the same fuel, the precise definition of it is an efficiency increase. To achieve that we had improvements in booking, avionics, crew training, business models (Ryanair and other low-costs), etc. The fact that we could make a few flights at incredible cost 80 years ago does not mean that we routinely achieving far safer, cheaper and frequent flights at the same speed today is stagnation, rather the opposite in my view.

I'm given a measure, one specifically of technological capability, and one that was specifically highlighted by a significant author within the field (and whose work was cited within TFA), to make a point.

I get the strong impression you don't like that point, and would prefer to use different measures. That's fine.

But it doesn't invalidate the measure or point made.

There are obvious reasons for speed to not increase further, namely the speed of sound as you already mentioned, so this is a non-starter.

You see my point. You admit it. You state it freely yourself. And yet you reject it.

SST would be useful, and is used in specific domains (satellite launches, military). On a costs/benefit commercial basis, given externalities and legal frameworks, however, technology has hit if not a dead end, then a remarkably robust barrier to further progress.

The areas in which air travel has expanded, and the mechanisms by which it's done so, are notable because they are largely not related to aeronautical engineering: flight controls or power plants.

There's some exception to the latter, jet engines have increase in efficiency both in terms of fuel consumption and power-to-weight ratios. But that's limited incremental improvement. (I'm pretty sure Vaclav Smil addresses this in Energy and Civilisation, as one of his power-plant efficiency curves. These tend to approach asymptotic limits with time.)

Most of the efficiencies though come from smaller aircraft, economies of scale, increased load factors, some materials advances leading to lightweighting, and removal of both price and amenities lower-bounds which have made available lower-cost, but also far-less comfortable, air travel. There's also been a significant, though largely incremental over time increase in overall safety. No major breakthroughs, but chipping away at major risks with time.

Some of those risks are reversing. The number of commercial aircraft downed by missile attack seems to be increasing in recent decades, at least on an absolute basis. It's still likely falling relative to total passenger miles. Still sucks to be you if you're on the wrong end of that ratio.

But aeronautical engineering has hit a hard stop.

Seeing and understanding that point viscerally is key to grasping the premise of technological limits. Many people seem exceedingly averse to doing so.

FRED data go only to 2002, but:

"Revenue Passenger Miles for U.S. Air Carrier Domestic and International, Scheduled Passenger Flights"

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPM

Jan. 2000: 48.3b

Jan. 2022: 56.4b

"US airlines revenue passenger miles" 1974-3 -- 2004-11

This shows flattenings 1979--1984 (Iranian oil embargo, Reagan recession), again 1990--1992 (First Gulf War / recession), a strong climg through 2000, then a large post-9/11 drop and relatively flat trend through late 2004. Omitted is the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-airlines-revenue-pass...

Collaborative editing is an essential task in my job. Go back twenty years and folks were emailing copies of copies of drafts back and forth. Today, two authors use two keyboards and two screens and just type. That's very different.

The vast majority of the world is still doing the emailing back and forth method.

Source?

So if their productivity isn't growing, it might be because those people aren't taking advantage of productivity multiplying software. But there's no question that the collaboration capabilities of these software increases productivity.

More likely, multiple people got in a small room together and wrote it all out. Faster, less hassle, better collaboration and idea generation.

> write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word

Google docs and Overleaf have dramatically improved my collaborative writing workflow.

Long-distance collaboration is also drastically cheaper and easier than it used to be.

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.

Look at: Google Maps, Figma, any advanced enough web mail, Office 360.

Think about implementing these using the LAMP stack + Javascript from 2000.

Isn't that just saying browsers have gotten better?

OP was talking about overall system complexity.

The growth of JavaScript is not something to be happy about.

Why not?

> 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.

The software techniques you've listed are among the reasons why it's even possible to build more complex and powerful programs. Forward progress in software is always resisted by the contemporary programmers of the day who are deeply fond of their chosen anachronism and don't like it when they perceive the feeling that it is threatened by a newcomer. This is an ancient law of software that few seem to accept, but c is to assembly as python is to c and javascript is to python. Software developers tend to be thoughtful people, these tools exist for a reason.

This is so true its funny. I wrote c64 machine code and assembly still looks ridiculous. How is NOP easier to remember than AE? Every time I see base64 in JSON I'm reminded how much better life is if you make the effort to design a data format for a specific purpose. When I looked at all the convenient things in jquery some functions had just one line in them (I need help with this?), other things were so "good" they had me wonder why that isn't simply part of js. I'm aware how unreasonable it is in how you cant win either way.

I cant wait for the day some kind of GUI programming glued onto excel takes over the world so that we can all simultaneously raise our fist at the screen like grumpy old men.

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.

We do have much better services though. The feature set and scale of modern platforms and tools is mind blowing and so far ahead of what existed 10 years ago.

If you released any of the major apps we used 10 years ago today, most people would consider them unusable garbage.

I hate modern apps. They are bloated, slow, buggy and not at all customizable. Something went wrong in the last 10 years.

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 call center seems to be like the standard MBA case of a cost center to optimize but where efficiency is only half correlated with positive customer experience. I mean if you can route people to the right place, and get peoples questions answered quickly it's great, but that leaves a long tail of people in the nightmare situation of digging through phone trees, dealing with untrained staff, or having someone try to cut a call short rather than give you the best experience.

The only real advance in call center tech in the last twenty years (imo) has been the “press 1 to be called back in the order your call was received”.

My dentist has a PBX setup so that when you call and you don't get anyone or leave a voicemail, you get a link in a SMS with a link to schedule a call back.

The only real advance for the customer (if you don't count voiceprint authentication, natural language IVR, agents having all your customer details ready as the call connects saving lots of tedious dictation).

On the business side, you have real-time load metrics to feed your automatic workforce management, rerouting of calls based on staffing and load, highly accurate transcription and sentiment analysis that's always on (even when you think you're on hold, always mute your phone), the accessibility of enterprise-grade contact centres to SMB, and about a dozen other things that weren't possible 20 years ago.

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word.

I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

For sure! I’m definitely hoping to see more workers and employees used to short conference calls while growing up on Skype and Discord. So perhaps as the new generations come into the workforce we’ll see it much more. Definitely seems like I’m much more efficient with my peers while discussing stuff over voice than text.

Although I've been using networked email as a primary communications channel for my entire computing life (since ~1978), I did work for a couple of large companies before it was widely adopted and you simply cannot imagine the amount of infrastructure required to produce and move physical paper documents around, not to mention disseminating mass communications. Moving that all online was a massive improvement, even with its drawbacks.

Now it's been ubiquitous for a while, people now try to deal with the drawbacks.

The cliche of 'started in the mailroom' is expired by now but it was there for a reason. Businesses had a whole division whose job was to collect, shuffle, and deliver manila envelopes. Someone would come around with a push cart and drop them in the inbox.

Working in the mailroom was an entry-level, menial job, but one which rewarded intelligence and afforded a unique view into the function of the company.

Depends on the context. Just yesterday, I called the city parking, because I had made a payment the previous day, but I never received confirmation. After the separate ten minute queues just to be hung up on really frustrated me. I sent a short email to an email address I could find, and they fixed my issue within two hours of sending it.

> refused to get on the phone

So your solution to this attitude is to insist more on meetings and phone calls ?

Did anyone ask that person why they came to hate getting on the phone that much ?

I've observed similar issues: https://seliger.com/2015/08/02/how-computers-have-made-grant...

Lowering the friction of process often results in more process, but not more result.

Email has its place for lower priority communication where fast response and interaction is not important.

Text chat is good for interaction but it can bog down with a lot of back and forth and sometimes the meaning is hard to get across. The latency while better than email is still slow and people will often not ask questions that they should.

When those channels are not enough I'll initiate a quick voice/video call with one or a few people to go over a specific topic. Generally we can clarify the situation through some quick questions and answers. The latency is low and answers often invoke other questions. You can usually reach an agreement very quickly that way.

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.

There's also people with no high school diplomas making 6 figures from advertising on those very same social networks.

A good hustler can make six figures in a sales job without any diploma.

Sales doesn't care about your credentials, all your boss wants to know is if you can close deals.

Emotional intelligence is still intelligence. You need high EQ to be a good salesman. So still on the right side of the bell curve.

Different bell curve.

Siri, give me the most HN comment on productivity development. (Golly gee, this consumer technology sure is swell)

“The right side of the bell curve can now program an application worth many dollars per month and zero marginal reproduction costs.”

“The inventions of the last 50 years were of smart people for smart people.”

building the surveillance state for big brother isn’t intelligent. also, they get paid a salary.

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.

But humans are still limited. Until we accelerate our evolution, we'll be stuck at the speed of glaciers in terms of our potential.

Memetics is much more potent than genetics. We're about to achieve much more than people could 2000 years ago, not because humans have genetically evolved to be that much smarter, but because we have memetically evolved much more sophisticated social structures. Genetics is still important, and augmenting individual intelligence should still be pursued, but memetics is in the driver seat now.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? What kind of new social structures are enabling progress in this way?

New forms of government, larger and more complicated corporations, public schooling, labor unions, global shipping routes, universities, remote work, wikipedia, internet forums, open-source software development, stock markets, etc etc.

None of these required a genetic change in the individuals involved, just a "memetic" change in the way the individuals acted, communicated, and thought.

horizontal transfer via memetics is not guaranteed to be a productive or stabilizing force in the long term, it could be convincingly argued many of our nastiest problems today derive from immaturity in handling novel forms of information flow and hybrid agency enabled by modern social and physical technology

the task, imo, is to remove memetic agency from the driver's seat and put ourselves back in it, or if we want a chauffeur at least to make sure it's taking us into a viable future

If you have the means, it's nice.

Where is this mythical $45/mo. 10gbps fiber connect?

Starry in Boston is around this perf and cost

Starry seems to charge $50 per month for 0.2 Gbit/second speeds. OP is claiming 50x faster speed at a lower price

Starry actually has way better speeds

Source? (Are you sure you aren’t confusing Mbps and Gbps?)

I used Starry, they for some reason advertise speeds slower than what you get in practice.

https://www.starry.com/ shows plans with 200Mbps down for 50 USD per month. I don't see anything about 10Gbps. Maybe this person lives in Switzerland? I have seen some crazy stuff there for about 50 USD.

I get 0.05gbps, for $45/mo.

Wow, where can you ever find such a bargain? :)

Sonic in Oakland, CA.

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.

All the productivity gains are nullified by a drop in risk-taking.

+ increased "compliance" measures

> 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?

A Rolodex used to be enough.

Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something.

Act 2.0 was the desktop version of CRM. and alot of old systems had built in customer databases. had contact info in them. and zoom is cool but phones work in a lot of cases.

If your team was sitting at desks on a fast network, Act! probably obtained 80% of the productivity benefit of the best available, most expensive CRM available today. Or maybe even better than that; because (again assuming a fast network locally) it could be operated with keystrokes quite a lot faster than many of today’s CRM system.

I worked in a place where we had phone, email, and FAX (!) integration set up also. A rep could be on a phone they didn't dial, configuring a quote for what their contact asked for, click a button and it emailed or faxed to the contact. Over 20 years ago.

1000x increase in capability coupled with 1000x increase in waste

> Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something.

A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least.

> A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least.

Yes, absolutely true.

Given "hundreds of filing cabinets" though, how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime? How many leads will themselves have died before you even get to their number?

It's "advancement" only in the sense that we've made hoarding more efficient (which is a technical achievement in itself).

> how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime?

that's why you also have software to do it more efficiently - may be even automated ways of contacting the lead. AKA, spam.

But it does increase sales.

They would get another rolodex.

specifically they said since 2004 productivity increases were only 1% per year. cloud computing/saas probably adds to productivity but not as much as converting from files to desktop computer systems.

I'm not sure how they're measuring productivity. From my own experience as a software developer, I've seen how software makes individuals more productive. But the end result of this productivity is not 2x as much output overall but 0.5x as many people to achieve the same level of productivity. We're decreasing costs but maybe the market doesn't need 2x or 5x more productivity. There just isn't that kind of demand anywhere -- especially with fewer people working.

"Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output".

Usually in economics the input is labor hours, but for example "energy intensity" is the productivity of how much energy a process uses. In the macroeconomic case it's GDP divided by total energy used, but some industries are more energy intensive than others -- they have lower productivity from their energy use.

Thus 2X the output and same output with 1/2 the people are identical: both describe doubling productivity.

> "Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output".

Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining workers only work 10 hours per week, but the average hour yields 5% higher output than the previous year.

> Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week.

No. Productivity is simply output divided by some input factor. Employment rate, hours worked per week, wage: none are involved in that calculation (unless you're measuring productivity of the wage, i.e. COGS).

> No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining workers only work 10 hours per week, but the average hour yields 5% higher output than the previous year.

On the contrary, investors and managers will be very impressed by that.

> On the contrary, investors and managers will be very impressed by that.

No, they won't. You're free to propose any definitions of "productivity" you like, but this particular proposal doesn't remotely match what anyone will ever be talking about in discussions about productivity in the economy.

Indeed I propose the standard definition of productivity used in economics departments, business schools, and thousands of textbooks, news articles and the like, including those written by people, like Brynjolfsson, quoted in the article.

Seems a lot easier to refer to papers, statistics and the like when you use the same terminology everyone else does.

But how is this productivity measured across an entire country? How does unemployment factor in? If I'm making the workers twice as effective but we then lay off 50% of the workforce -- how does that factor in?

I've made many jobs disappear.

> But how is this productivity measured across an entire country?

On a total GDP basis it would be GDP divided by labor hours, no more no less. A national economy is complex, and especially one like the US or Europe, in which a lot of financial services are involved. So typically it is done on a sector basis (labor force productivity in steelmaking or construction, or mining, or office work).

Sometimes it's quite tricky: when the "output" of a given person goes up a lot it could lead to a different product (e.g. when the spreadsheet meant one person could do financial analysis that had previously required multiple people and a lot of time, it didn't mean less time doing analysis but instead significantly more sophisticated analysis in the same time, with the objective (at least) of finding better deals or avoiding worse ones).

> How does unemployment factor in?

It doesn't. It's simply output divided by input. Don't mix the two.

The same output with half the people means a doubling in productivity for that activity. What happens to the other half of people? Orthodox economics says they find some other job, perhaps a more productive one or more likely less so. Pragmatics says some never work again, some find a (often but not always) better job.

That's harsh, but the "lump of labor" fallacy is indeed a fallacy.

I think the non-super rich see a lot of advantages from the modern economy. As an example, just yesterday, I was picking up an order at Walmart. The guy who brought the bags to my car had Airpods in. The existence of Airpods (and phones, Internet, Bluetooth, streaming services, etc) may not have made this guy more productive, but it probably improves his life somewhat.

Am I missing something, or is this like the first time you see a guy with AirPods? What’s the significance?

It’s that people working boring or unpleasant jobs can have an audio environment of their choice. Music, podcasts, audiobooks.

This wasn’t possible when it required a huge device, but AirPods are so unobtrusive and socially acceptable that workers can wear them without it attracting undue attention.

Pranksters on YouTube use it for the same reason; people are used to seeing it and don’t associate it with receiving voice instructions.

One significant thing here: this is a piece of technology which no one in the entire world, at any level of wealth, had a couple decades ago. But today a person in a relatively low-ranked job carrying orders out at Walmart... casually has this technology for fun.

This does not measure as a productivity improvement, but it’s pretty great.

Most non-positional goods are like this. You getting Airpods doesn't make mine any worse. Statistically, you getting Airpods makes mine better, because it increases the chances of there being more content I like.

and when he gets home he can eat bread and watch the circus on his phone!

Sure. Do you think it would be better to be poor without bread and circuses? Our bread and circuses are getting better and that seems good.

A massive CRM was possible in the early 90s on easily obtainable hardware. Earlier if you wanted to spend the money.

It’s not immediately clear what Salesforce adds that literally couldn’t be done with 1995 tech.

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation:

Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution

4T / 300 M/ 30 = 500$ per year (not exactly life changing wealth)

So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year.

I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY.

*https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-tril...

At the end of the day, humans want simple solutions to simple problems and the "wealth going to the top" theorey is super easy to understand and super easy to solve. There's only one problem: it's not true. it's debunked now. The real problem of decreasing wealth is much harder to solve and has many causes

> So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year.

Loaded use of the world “stole” there.

This is a faulty analysis. It’s well studied and well known, for example, that the top 10% of people income wise have ~70% of the wealth in the US. Similar patterns exist globally. This has been reproduced many ways by many people and squarely contradicts your calculation.

"stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back.

You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution.

The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.

Let’s frame it differently. If you redistributed all wealth from just the top 1% today to all us citizens, each person would get 40T / 300M = $133K, which would make a real (and massive) difference in most people’s lives. Redistribute the top 10%, and everyone gets $320k in savings. This would be an average of 30x more savings for the bottom half than they’d have otherwise.

The biggest problem with your calculation is the arbitrary line of billionaires, which leaves out all the millionaires. The top 1% have wealth exceeding 40T, while the bottom 50% have sum total wealth less than the 4T you used for billionaires.

Another problem is dividing by 30, that’s not well justified. Half of all us wealth was gained in the last 10 years. Your calculation implicitly assumes you would redistribute slowly, but since you’re using a hypothetical, why would you do that? Why not redistribute all of it today and see if the sum is meaningful? It doesn’t make sense to redistribute slowly, regardless of how long it took to accumulate.

A third problem is leaving out income from the summary, since wealth is savings and the lower class has little. You conclude that $500/year sounds small but glossed over the fact that it represent savings not income, and that it would add up to a lot even in your setup.

Ok, if you disagree with the number 30 as the number of years needed to acquire that wealth, just use yearly income figures.

Assuming 60K is the average. So, top 10% at 173K means 113K more than the median houshold. 113/10 = 11.3K extra. So, redistributing top 10% would mean 11.3K extra for 60K average. It's something but not life changing. Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto winner loses almost everything within a few years, I'd say an additional 11K wouldn't help people a huge amount.

And, you have to remember, this is an excerise for learning how much wealth is distributed per capita in the top. if you actually instituted anything close to these policies, total, average wages would decrease dramatically as the reduced incentive to earn more prevents people from earning more.

> So, top 10% at 173K

That’s the threshold income of the top 10%, not the average. The average is much higher.

You’re insisting the spread out wealth is small in the face of evidence that it’s large, larger than your summary even by your own analysis.

> Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto winner loses almost everything within a few years

This is yet another faulty analysis, and the 70% number and “million dollar” part are viral misquotes, they are wrong. https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-fina...

I don’t blame you for it, this misleading headline has been widely reported over and over again. (But please consider not repeating this false information anymore.)

The primary study that lead to this conclusion is a study of Florida lottery winners of amounts less than $150K. The actual result of the study showed bankruptcy rates falling initially, and then rising again after several years, as people ran out of their winnings. The rates returning to normal was reported as people losing everything, which is clearly misleading spin.

https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf

I would argue it's still a worthy goal if only to redistribute the influence that wealth brings.

>The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY.

Don't leave us hanging throw8383833jj, where did the wealth go?

The biggest drop in wealth is Shelter and Medical. 50 years ago land was much cheaper. A 300K house (non-land cost) costs 310K (maybe 10k for the land). Whereas today, in states where much job creation happens (i won't name names), a 300K house costs 600K or more. You could say, the previous land owner made all that money and it's true. But, it's just a one time wealth transfer from the latest generation to previous generations of land owners. The problem is, going forward from here, there are no more winners in this game. By, charging vast amounts of money for land that should cost very little, we're simply depriving human being of wealth. Even CA, has more acres than people and yet, even in the country side where there is miles of empty land in every direction, we see houses huddled together, a mere few feet apart like some kind of nazi concentration camp. going forward, this is a game with no winners. the wealth is simply denied. conversely, by denying ourselves this wealth, we can create the wealth out of thin air by allowing the land to be developed OR simply by moving jobs (where jobs go, people follow) to areas where there is sufficient developable land (politically achievable).

Also, there's a huge laundry list of regulation, and zoning that impact numerous industries like housing and transportation that make these things more expensive than they need to be and pass those costs onto consumers.

Just for comparison, i once, calculated that in my area, it takes roughly 80,000 man hours to afford the cheapest house in my suburban neighborhood in the bay area. And yet, in thailand (Jon Jai a humble farmer with no education and no construction training and youtuber), has demonstrated that he could build a modest home with just 200 man hours! He'll tell you, that despite the fact that he lives in country where economists say his per capita income is more than 20 tiems lower than US, he's easily able to afford a house, 1 acre of land and enough food for his family of six and only works 15 min a day (2 months full time out of the year). too much to explain here, but you can visit his channel on youtube for details. I was blown away. and of course, he has the freedom to do so, because less regulations and zoning to get in the way. Sure, he doesn't have many gadgets or cars and even a rice cooker would be hard to acquire but he has the essentials of life: shelter, food and water in abundance: and that's what freedom is largely about.

Agree! That’s super interesting. I’ve longed for a life that is much less coupled to work. Thinking about the US, it is somewhat ironic that many US residents think of themselves as self-reliant yet end up inadvertently supporting systems that undermine true autonomy.

The challenge with shelter is that it is fundamentally a positional good. Everyone wants to be within the x% most convenient, which is say, desirable, places to live. So as there are more and more people with more money to chase those limited "slots", they get more expensive. Making everyone worse off.

The solution is to massively build many more new good places to live; but there are also enormous forces against that.

Absolutely >>> The solution is to massively build many more new good places to live

People underestimate the positive impact of this solution.

It's not like we don't have the space. All that's lacking is the will.

Space is not just space. Space has qualities such as non humid climates, near mountains, beaches, access to potable water, and of course, political considerations.

Also, people like more space than less space so incumbents will fight against others coming in, unless the others are bringing benefits such as money or labor for the incumbents.

When I read “Everyone” in your post, bells went off on my head. It’s too broad a statement. You could offer me a 2M home in the Bay Area, and I’d auction it off to charity. A 5M condo in Manhattan and I’d do the same. You can only say there are enough people with enough money and determination to bid up property in certain areas. Two very wealthy people bidding on one property can take it to astronomical levels, but they are not “everyone”. There are more people who want to live in the Bay Area than there is affordable housing. The number of people who want to live in the Bay Area, though, is a fairly small percentage of the US population (ignoring the homeless who seem to love the Pacific Coast).

Most places in the US are already “good” places to live, if you come with the right attitude, e.g. immigrants looking for a better life. After WWII, GIs dispersed themselves all over the country. They had seen (sometimes too much of) the world, and were open to, and happy with, anyplace in the US that gave them a job, a house and an ability to raise a family. They knew how bad it could be and counted on being able to improve wherever they moved to in the US. And they mostly did, thanks to a solid economy, a stable political system and pure moxie. Same with non-wealthy foreign immigrants. Making the most of what you have generally leads to a pretty nice life anywhere in the US. Even Canada :-).

Internal mobility in the US has been on the decline in recent years, perhaps a sort of generational timidity combined with familial inertia has led to certain highly-populated areas experiencing irrationally high housing costs.

If all you want is a shack on some land you own, you could do that for much less than 80,000 man hours. Land in NE Arizona sells for a few hundred dollars an acre. There's no zoning and very little in the way of regulation.

Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money. That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000 dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to me.

30 is my estimation as to the number of years it takes for the average billionaire to achieve their wealth. most billionaires are pretty old, so I'd say 30 is conservative.

so, 2K per family/year in a country where the median houshold income is 60K, that's about 3.3% of their income.

It’s irrelevant how long it took to accumulate. If you’re hypothetically redistributing wealth, then the hypothetical side assumption should be that it took the same amount of time to accumulate the “redistributed” wealth. You should be comparing saved wealth in the real world to saved wealth in the hypothetical world, not using a strange misleading wealth per year metric.

If 60K is lot, how about giving each person 15K and stopping all taxes and redistribution from there on?

>I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY.

I find this hypothesis very intriguing. I too have found it troubling that the narrative against billionaires doesn't quite seem to line up with the envelope math. That said, I wonder about the optimal parameters of the inevitable pareto distribution of wealth. I think the effect on money velocity and total wealth generation among other things is worth considering. In history, it does seem generally like conditions have been good when inequality is relatively low. (At least within a window of time next to that time.)

However, I'm really hoping you could elaborate more on what you're calling an apparent loss of wealth since I'm very much curious.

What information is that conclusion based on?

Without delving into a description that is TOO laborious, could you give a 100,000ft summary or list of things you think that have contributed to that or where you think the wealth has gone?

as a starting point for figuring out the drop in wealth, I think we should calculate things in terms of number of man hours worked to achieve a given objective: shelter, food, water. Using dollars and CPI numbers is fraught with problems due to problems in their methodologies, which are quite numerous.

The most important aspects of wealth are the basic needs of human beings: shelter, food, water and by extension transportation (because it's required to earn "money"), healthcare (because if you have an accident they can come after your shelter), and education (because it's a requirement for earning money").

Now we have a framework for identifying drops in wealth.

I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation. if you dive into those with the methodology of number of man hours worked to achieve them, you'll see what i'm talking about. Sometimes it's not obvious. Cost per mile in transportation can decrease (progress) and you can still get a decrease in wealth, if for instance the average commute distance increases faster than the drop in cost per mile. Just an example, of where increasing capabilities over time, don't necessarily translate to greater wealth. Generally speaking don't just calculate the increase in capability/man hour but also the amount of capability required to achieve the objective.

Growing Govt: over the last 100 years we've seen countries grow govt spend as percent of GDP from low single digits to 40 to 50%. You may be in favor of all this spending but I strongly suspect that the total amount you get back from govt, is less than what went in. example: "this is especially apparent when someone needs to pay 5K for a lawyer, just to apply for medicaid." alot of wealth can be lost in this way. solution: society needs much more efficient means of wealth transfer mechanisms.

Hypothesis: exponential Growing human population on a finite planet with finite resources (finite amount of developal land), ore, oil, commodities, will lead to or has led to decreases in wealth which show up as paying more and more for things.

wow! maybe you should write it up in a blog. awesome

I partially agree with this:

> I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation.

But my conclusion is very different: shelter, healthcare and transport have not evaporated. If anything, we are more capable of treating people than before. We have the internet now, we should be able to educate more people.

The problem is that the cost of those things has increased significantly in the last 80 years, but salaries have stagnated. A diabetic teacher could buy a house and afford insulin on a single salary, now they barely can afford the later while they live with their parents, because they can't even rent.

As to why things are more expensive now... well I think the answer is that the difference is going to a small group of extremely rich individuals. Insurance and hospital owners in the case of healthcare, University owners on education. And lawyers in all layers.

The cost of transportation is a bit more complex. It is a finite world, yes. But we'll run of nice weather to plant crops before we run out of oil.

Both can be true:

a.) A tiny number of billionaires have reorganized society in ways that cause benefits to accrue to themselves.

b.) The net size of those benefits, distributed equally over all people, is tiny.

All this means is that people are being used in absurdly inefficient ways, because that benefits whoever is in charge.

For example, plantations are arguably like this. They are less productive, per acre, than smallholdings. But they scale: A single owner can make the plantation arbitrarily large. "Who cares if the country grows half as much per acre as it could, if I get to control 10x the acres? That's still 5x the wealth for me!"

Surely we in software, home of the Mythical Man Month, know all about this? It doesn't matter if the microserfs are less productive, if you can have all of them to yourself.

I'm reality it would be even less than that since the wealth of most billionaires is in the form of speculative wealth such as company stock. If tomorrow everyones wealth was liquidated through a magical oracle that could know the true economic value of any given asset you'd find there would be a lot less billionaires in the world

"True economic value" will vary depending on how much the owner discounts future vs present value produced by the asset (e.g. dividends or imputed rent)

It's not that I advocate for wealth redistribution, quite the opposite in fact. But I certainly wish that these leaders would just, y'know, RAISE WAGES. Rent is skyrocketing, housing is skyrocketing, medical expenses are skyrocketing, car prices are skyrocketing, and after 40 years of this, it's finally just now that wages are starting to catch up a tiny bit. Meanwhile, CEO pay has risen >30% since the pandemic alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-worker...

Right, rising wages is what most people demand of politicians.

But, there's two ways to get more of what you want:

1) rising wages

2) lowering costs.

#1 -> it would be nice but you can only squeeze so much blood from a turnip.

#2 has gotten far too little attention and has a lot of potential to do good, if we start pursuing it in a way that increases overall prosperity, not decreasing propsperity

I don't know if raising wages alone will help. Increased wages will just make cost of production more expensive and raise prices or allow landlords to charge more for rent. What's more important is solving housing, transportation, and healthcare issues so people can satisfy those needs cheaply. Build more houses, improve urban planning and public transit, and create national healthcare.

It'd be a lot more effective to redistribute that wealth, first, not over 30 years, and second, not to 100% of the population, but to the bottom income brackets, so the smallest quintile or even decile. So a one-time payout to the bottom 10% would be $150,000. For 20% or 30% of the population, that kind of money could absolutely and instantly lift them out of poverty.

Moreover, you needn't take every last cent from these billionaires. Just leave them with a mere $100 million each and they still have more money than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime.

Seems immoral to give it to the bottom 10% of people in the US, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Why not give $15,000 each to the 300 million poorest people in the world, or $5000 to the 1 billion poorest?

there are oligarchs in every country, just like the united states. Could drain the swamp and give people back their money.

I see this come up as a gotcha every time redistribution of wealth is ever discussed, but surprisingly the left can be just a nationally minded as anyone else.

I’d be concerned with involving those people in the calculation when we’re under the same political body. As long as we’re in separate nation states that’s kind of an in house issue they need to decide on how they want to deal with it

But the billionaires in USA are international, they "stole" wealth from workers all over the world, your solution to give that to Americans still results in those workers having their labour stolen by Americans. Constantly stealing labour from workers all over the world and giving it to American workers seems just as unethical as giving it to American billionaires, both situations results in a small number of people hording all the wealth.

And then if you distribute it fairly among all the workers who actually did the work to amass that wealth, then there is very little left per worker. And you do it so the poorer gets more since they got less initially, then the American workers wont get a single cent since they are all rich and most of the labour is done in China and India.

Almost any redistribution scheme you come up with is going to look unfair from some perspective. I shy away from "immoral" because that's just a triggering word. What we're really trying to decide are the terms of the social contract, and despite my libertarian past, I am now 100% on board with introducing a personal wealth cap significantly under $1 billion. No person could really spend that much money in day-to-day meatspace activities in a lifetime; it can only be hoarded, squandered, and splurged on flamboyant things, none of which I think we should allow until we get out of climate crisis mode.

> it's not true. it's debunked now

Where has it been debunked?

your "simple equation" is completely inadequate. When a company improves their efficiency they don't just cut a check "to the billionaires"

If it is causing share price increases, every shareholder benefits. Why are you excluding millionaires?

> 5,671,005 US households have a net worth of $3 million or more

There's another 16T right there, minimum.

The companies in S&P 500 hold another 1.5T in cash

Presumably there are workers at these companies being rewarded handsomely for these productivity gains, how do you account for that wealth?

The housing market in California grew 1.4T last year, now sitting at over 9T total "value".

This is just first thoughts for my envelope math. Looking at "billionaires" is overly simplistic

The gap between the richest and the poorest is probably the largest ever, but today people are also living far more comfortably than ever: electricity, heated water, food and water at a press of a button, generally good transportation to pretty much everywhere. What is lacking, for the less privileged, is mostly lack of access to affordable housing and a bad diet (arguably this is mostly due to the enticing nature of fast food and lack of education about how bad it is). Other than that the basic life necessities don't differ too wildly for the rich and the everyone who is not homeless.

I believe it needs to also be said that bad diet is a side effect of everyone trying to produce with cheaper and cheaper materials. I shudder to think what kinds of ingredients are some of the foods I see in cheaper shops made from.

This is not sustainable. It cannot last for that much longer IMO. Literally and metaphorically, people are getting sick of it. They notice. They are not dumb. They might be in denial (people just LOVE their chips and cola for some reason) but they are not dumb.

I see more and more people in my neighborhood going to the local market and negotiating with vendors coming straight from agrarian villages for a "monthly subscription" of sorts -- you bring me one huge basket with fruits and veggies every weekend, I pay you, say, $200 a month. The vendor gets a stable income, you get actual bio food and don't have to pick and choose every tomato and parsley leaf every damn time. The vendors have a vested interest not to cheat their most stable and profitable customers.

Sadly all these societal changes are glacially slow, giving the opportunists plenty of breathing room to swindle people and get rich for decades but oh well, until we develop collective consciousness it seems that this won't ever change... :|

I think it's a little to easy to overlook the abject poverty which still exists in this country. More than two million Americans lack access to clean water or sanitation. I personally know millennials who didn't have hot water in their house growing up. They would heat water on the stove for baths, at least when their utilities were turned on. There exist towns where literal sewage is running out of people's houses in areas where kids play. Hookworm for example is still rampant in parts of the US. Half of our rivers and streams and one third of our lakes are too polluted to swim or fish in, much less drink from. 99% of households having a refrigerator doesn't mean these folk are living comfortably.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/

Because software cannot produce resources just because it exists. Productivity refers to being able to actually manufacture more widgets and things like food, roads. Yes technology has made things cheaper. By moving things across the globe and creating a complex supply chain that can produce more goods for less energy and raw material input.

But the per Capita availability of energy and minerals is a fundamental bottleneck that things like CRM software can only go so far in helping.

The article talks about software that allows a call center employee to handle more customers better. This is great but how does something like this help society produce more heating and food which are currently in short supply ? It makes the company more profit and saves customers some money. But if they try to actually get more food it will cause inflation.

I would highly encourage people to read the work of Vaclav Smil. In the grand scheme of things iPhones are irrelevant.

Half the world depends on natural gas and ammonia fertilizer so they don't starve to death. We are living through the consequences of this as we speak.

Software simply isn't on the scale of things like coal, oil, natural gas, electricity or even washing machines.

Computers might be more like the printing press. Perhaps centuries from now we can look back and say what innovations came about due to multi century second order and third order effects.

We in the industry have become lost in the world of bits and "productivity" in producing TikToks and targetting ads for mobile games doesn't help as much as we think towards supply. These are fundamentally ways of aggregating and coordinating demand.

The problem is now on the supply side. We need software that runs on robots eliminating workers and working 24x7 doing things like mining, agriculture and warehouses. We also need eliminate middle men and deliver directly to the consumer.

Beyond that we need fundamentally new energy sources. Software can help here but increasing digitization mainly creates fat middlemen who don't add as much productivity into the world as they take.

Hence I think Chinas new approach to tech regulatuion that curtails middleman platforms and encourages startups on the supply side makes a lot of sense.

Services are also productivity.

Yes but only to an extent. We cannot have an economy only of rappers and influencers.

Lost me at the bit about fud from rich people. I really doubt there is a conspiracy.

Of course regular people are seeing benefits to increased productivity. The question is whether these benefits are really benefits at all. The average adult spends over 12 hours a day consuming media [1]. It's worth noting that much of this is passive consumption like radio in the background, but active consumption is undeniably increasing as well, most notably smartphone usage. I think the problem is that the more optimized our society becomes, the less true the economic assumption of rational human behavior becomes. Google Maps, for example, saves me time looking at maps rather than doing browsing Hackernews. However, when I think about it rationally, I was no less happy spending a few minutes planning my route before a trip instead of browsing HN during that same time.

[1] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...

“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich””””

You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average.

Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital.

It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades.

If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.

In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers.

It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.

> Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.

To note, in the olden days, mistakes written in your record or misinterpretations (e.g.took the wrong record from the cabinet) would just have been a fact of life and nobody might even notice. Ms Wilson and Ms Wiston just shouldn't have been in the same hospital at the same time.

As you say everything was more flexible, more fuzzy. If you wanted the world to look orderly you'd quickly sweap under the rug the misaligned bits or disappear what you don't want there.

This is also why you use cash and paper register if you need your restaurant's finances to look pristine on paper while still racking in money that doesn't need to be accounted.

> If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.

I would argue this isn’t necessarily because of computers but a byproduct of an antiquated system and process being codified into a computer. The reason for this seems to be that there are structural inefficiencies built into our healthcare system that create a ton of added complexity that is near impossible to unwind because of legal (contractual and privacy-related) risks. For example, any attempts at improving efficiency in patient care creates potential liabilities for medical professionals. People are scared to innovate in this space, so the programs are just digital translations of an existing process. This requires a time investment to learn the “new way” of doing the same thing, and builds inherit laziness because steps are still require that should have been automated away. Medical notes are a good example of this; it’s required to be documented in an extremely specific way and of a certain length because of insurance so it just ends up being copy and pasted, free text, by the physician to meet this requirement.

The way "productivity" is calculated is fundamentally flawed though, making it a flawed metric to discuss or use.

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/01/17/debunking-the...

Consider bullshit jobs. Yes, there's "work" being done, so it's "productive," but is it really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

> I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity.

See Solow paradox:

> The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either 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, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0. The 1970s to 1980s 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.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

>Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer?

Yes, things are much faster now. But having to manually scan an entire office of files sequentially was never a thing.

The files were alphabetized, indexed, collated. Clerks knew what they were doing.

In digging through my home state of Indiana's Marriage records, they had an ingenious system that did a fair bit of error correction and sped up retrieval of information by orders of magnitude. This system goes back to the 1800s, consists of an index, and sequentially recorded Marriage Licenses, bound in the same book. Entries were indexed by both the groom and brides last name, which meant in most cases, you could recover from a single error. Worst case, you had to scan that one book for the County, for that year, or fraction thereof. If you knew the date, that made it much faster as well.

Richard Nixon had a plan for dealing with this, but changed his mind at the last second. [1]

1 - https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-presid...

Where did all the productivity benefits go?

The answer is probably: to competition. If one company got CRM, wow, huge productivity boost! They would sell so much more per unit of salesperson labor input.

But it's a competitive world, so a lot of companies get CRM. The additional sales productivity gets competed back out; perhaps with the recipients of sales efforts (who now have a large increase in the amount of incoming contacts) losing/wasting as much productivity in aggregate as the companies using the software have gained.

The same dynamic applies to many other areas. Not to all areas of course; there are also real massive, long term benefits to productivity. Famously it used to take over half of all human effort just to keep us fed. It doesn’t anymore.

Medical record digitization seems to have had a neutral-to-negative impact on hospital efficiency. It's hard to believe since the alternative sounds mind-numbingly inefficient but there are tons of low-tech streamlined processes (like having a whiteboard in each patient's room) which are being undermined by having a constellation of disconnected staff all dumping information into Epic and not having time to read other entries.

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.

Writing or titling an article with an obviously false premise is an easy way to invoke emotions and get clicks.

Sort of related to this:

https://xkcd.com/386/

The phenomenon is also called Cunningham's Law: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

Well, for the lazy, there's a nice summary here:

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

I've pre-selected a few lines because the problem is supposed to exist on the data of rich countries. You can deselect them at the blue bar at the top of the page (it's not obvious).

I couldn't cut the data in any way that showed the issue ever existed. There is an half decade long decrease on the wealth of the poorer countries but nothing else on this graph.

Anyway, "productivity" isn't GDP per capta. It's close to the GDP divided by the total worked hours. The fact that the GDP per capta is increasing (I didn't expect this) really puts the productivity problem in an entirely new light.

The graph looks linear. If productivity gains were increasing (or even staying constant), you'd expect it to be more than linear. This implies the rate of productivity change is decreasing.

Hum, ok, you expect an exponential growth in productivity. Any reason why?

Anyway, talk about an underspecified issue. The article simply has no claim at all of how they expect productivity to behave, just that it's not following the expectation.

The one productivity problem I'm aware about is about it not growing at all for decades, just moving on a noisy horizontal. It's relevant that the GDP per capita follows a different curve. That means that people are working more and adding less value by work-hour.

I don’t have an expectation. The article is essentially asking why is the second derivative of productivity negative despite increased technological advancement. I’m just pointing out that your graph shows that the second derivative of productivity is indeed negative.

Well, it's walking around zero, since the trend is a line. The rate of change is neither decreasing nor increasing in linear terms.

But, anyway, that's GDP per capita. Data for productivity is much less available, but here is some for the US alone (that's the change annualized):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=PRS85006092,

Notice that the rate of change itself (first derivative) stays for ages around 0.

I guess we're really talking about the first derivative of PRODUCTIVITY_GROWTH in the formula GDP/CAP(t) = GDP/CAP(t-1) * (1 + PRODUCTIVITY_GROWTH(t)).

That graph on my comment is the rate of change of productivity (on a relative base, so it's not a derivative, a derivative would be a small bit biased lower). It's what you are calling PRODUCTIVITY_GROWTH. (I didn't find one with the raw productivity.)

You can see directly on the graph that it stays for some times dancing around 0. Most of the times it's higher, but the times with a near 0 average are quite long. If you "integrate" it over the exponentials, you will get some times of approximately linear growth, separated by times of almost no growth. Those times of almost no growth are what people normally talk about when they talk about productivity stagnation. One of those was at the 80s when the computers were taking over offices, another one is quite recent, after the 2008 crisis.

Anyway, the GDP per capita graph is very different.

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.

except it did save a lot of time. Have you ever tried to wash clothes by hand? Increased standard of living counts in terms of increased productivity.

Exactly. We have a lot more free time, we've just raised our leisure standards (dining out more frequently, traveling more) and come up with more forms of entertainment (social media, streaming platforms, gaming). That this sounds to most of us like a wasted opportunity might be because these things are not very fulfilling, or it might just be the hedonic treadmill.

https://archive.ph/gbNj2

http://web.archive.org/web/20220524170241/https://www.nytime...

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.

I think somehow people have managed to conflate higher productivity with better quality of life. There's no such connection imo. The quality of life of a lot of people might have decreased, and because they mentally have a connection between productivity (of the country) vs their own quality of life, they feel that productivity increasing not leading to their own quality of life increasing, is a bad sign.

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.

A much better question would be: given all this new tech, why aren't we working less?

The rich people who own the tech are, you and I are not.

You're free to retire early and move to a country with a lower standard of living.

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.

I'm still inclined to mostly agree with OP who said that a visitor from 1880 to 1950 would be far more in awe than a visitor from 1950 to 2020, but it is funny sometimes how incredulous my kids are when I tell them that, for example, there was literally no way to open up a device that told you where you were when I was growing up.

Not a device but maps were a thing. I recall riding a motorbike with a backpack half filled with a book of maps. Heavy to have in a backpack for hours on end.

Also, before mobile phones at all, just meeting up with people required more time and you had to be specific. Now, get in the area and if you don't see them, message or call.

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.

is this something limited to software engineering ? other specific fields? practices like communication?

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.

When I think about the productivity adds from tech from the last 20 years, I'm often left wondering why we aren't working less .

Others have mentioned us navigating faster, having neat new gadgets, etc, but fundamentally what I and many others want is more free time

  > I'm often left wondering why we aren't working less

isn't that in direct conflict with expectations of compounded annual growth?

what does our economic (and political) models say about that?

because less work == less growth to many people...

Perhaps because too much of it is designed to turn people into products, rather than producers.

Replying only to the title:

Because nobody wants to be "the idiot who pays for innovation from which all our competitors will also benefit". It's like the arms race that the countries all over the world do; you might swear to everything that's holy you're peaceful but you don't know if your neighbor is an a-hole so you arm yourself just in case.

The amount of handy scripts and clever engineering solutions I've come up with in personal and freelance projects beats any salaried work creativity by 10x, if not 50x even. Regularly.

But after 20 years in the profession I learned not to offer these solutions in my regular work. The other programmers will mercilessly rip apart any of your ideas and will ask for literally every other way for you to do it and not the one you suggested. Nevermind that it's none of their damned business how I deliver the end result (I mean if it does NOT involve code to maintain in the future -- obviously).

It's weird. Guess we have some very common and stereotypical weaknesses?

But whatever the case, I gradually learned to keep my mouth shut and get the job done by any means necessary.

It's better to ask for an apology than for permission, I have found empirically.

I mean, technology making us more productive seems obviously true on it's face, so what gives?

--> Productivity, which is defined as the value of goods and services produced per hour of work.

Seems like an interesting measure. So as companies become more efficient and the cost of goods goes down, so does productivity. So you might be able to argue we were more probably productive per unit of work building mainframes than we are building iphones.

Curious how productivity is measured. Tried skimming the associated government PDF from the article, but it is lost on me:

"Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, as output decreased 2.4 percent and hours worked increased 5.5 percent"

How is this "output" measured, and what does it include? Has it kept up with the times? If I produce more Furbies for cheaper, does this productivity number go up? What if I create an ad-supported iPhone game as a solo developer that reaches millions of people? Does that factor into "output" somehow? Is the accounting different if I sell the game on the App Store, without ads instead? Did an educational company that recorded VHS tapes of science lectures for schools count into productivity before, but now that there is high-quality "free" (ad-supported) content on the internet, that no longer is a producing segment of our economy?

I am actually writing a book about this - and my thesis is "software literacy". Software is a form of literacy and people need to a) be literate b) have tools and permissions and culture to allow people to basically code their own solutions.

Most large companies have a sort of process-killing-glass-ceiling where only excel spreadsheets can pass through.

In evaluating stocks, I always view a well-written analysis that is signed by a person who has obviously put some honest work into it, and I know, from my own research TO BE OBVIOUSLY WRONG, as an extremely bullish indicator for that stock. Put more simply, if a smart person gives one or more COMPLETELY WRONG reasons for avoiding a stock, buy it. Treat this article in a similar vein. Moreover, I remember articles in the 80s, with an almost identical analysis about how Windows PC’s, which were by then ubiquitous, also lead to zero productivity growth. What happens is that the new technology is extremely productive to a group of experts, who aren’t particularly interested in disseminating their proprietary advantages. Eventually, “regular programmers” are tasked with writing similar applications, the good ones of which spread like wildfire.

From what I see, a lot more productivity can still be extracted from existing technology if only people would try to use it more.

Configuring software is regularly more complicated than it needs to be. And software developers are tied in to using the 'language of software' (visual and written language to describe widgets, disk space, bandwidth, latency, whatever) in their applications, leading to many users being unable to understand the capabilities of the tools they use.

Education of the next generation of kids to better understand software will tremendously help this. But so will, I think, design that pays more attention to sensible defaults when releasing software to market to solve specific problems, rather than leave it to users to configure things to their needs.

I suspect the hyperactive hivemind culture that's been one result of new technology. Sure, there's a lot more passive consumption going on, but really, what I see is a non-stop communication stream where nobody really gets to that moment to really let the mind rest and get properly bored to put together the bigger ideas.

When I try to isolate, even for a couple of hours, I get criticized by coworkers or my spouse about not responding quickly. So I end up spending my time mostly communicating or trying to get back on track. It's rather sad.

Ideally AI could offload these constant distractions, so unnecessary communications just don't need everyone's immediate response. But, well, I'll believe it when I see it

I've always wondered how much of this has to do with sweeping social changes that put people last.

Your average worker 50 years ago came home to a clean house, a homecooked meal on the table and an expectation of stability (both at work and at home). To "win" at life, all the engineer would need to do was engineer things to the highest standard.

Now, the average worker is competing with their spouse, competing with their colleagues, optimising a path between 15 different companies because that's the only path to rise the ranks, all with the constant threat that the rug could be pulled out from underneath them at any time with minimal warning.

Point is, the game we're playing now is different.

I don't mean this as a call out, but just want to highlight that this was never the experience of the average worker. It might have once been the experience of the average white male worker, but really you'd need an econ degree to say with something like certainty and it certainly wasn't the experience for minorities in this country

Most of today's technology keeps us busy but does not make us more productive.

Productivity via the hand of technology requires a true commitment to develop technology that augments human activity rather than replace it. Since that is most certainly not what we do with modern technology, we end up with systems that poorly replace humans and provide terrible interfaces between humans and those systems. Thus, it keeps us busy but not productive.

With regard to consumer technology, it is explicitly designed to keep consumers more busy than productive. A productive consumer gets in the pool and gets out. A busy consumer gets in the pool and stays there until the skin wrinkles and still lingers.

It has, but not many have taken advantage of it. It is an incomprehensible leap in self-education that has happened for my generation. People used to read by reserving books in libraries and waiting for them to arrive, taking weeks or months now you can download them immediately, able to search them and find the relevant pieces. Similarly learning of all possible skills, programing cheif among them has never been as easy. These are real productivity boons, but the article seems to be asking something completely different, more like why haven't BigTech giant profits trickled down and the answer doesn't have much to do with productivity.

I would think globalization and the shift from manufacturing to services is like a slow tax on productivity. so for every increase in productivity at some office there's a huge negative productivity impact when a factory moves overseas.

The gains are there but are mainly realized by the winning companies - I don't think they could have scaled like this otherwise?

+ Microsoft went from about $25B in annual revenue to ~200B in the past 20 years.

+ Apples currently holds about $200B in cash.

There's a paper (forgot the title or author, sorry) that gives the conclusion that it takes exponentially more resource to advance technologies forward in a linear fashion. Technological advances are not moving forward exponentially but rather it takes exponentially more resource to just keep progressing in linear scale. This applies to different disciplines across the board, in CS, in physics, chemistry, medical research, etc.

It might relate to the productivity debate. It might take exponentially more advances in technologies to improve productivity linearly.

Productivity has climbed steadily for decades. Wages, not so much.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

After a certain threshold, it is clear that human behavior exhibits many types of compensations, risk compensation as one, but I’m sure (from my personal experience) that there is productivity compensation.

Analysis done over the last century across many countries show that everyone is working fewer hours per year as we transition from an agricultural to a knowledge based economy; this likely means that people want to relax and that new productivity gains will be compensated by fewer working hours and more relaxation.

When we come up with the potential to do more with less, we invent shit to fill the gaps. I remember discovering a video of an executive from Symbolics stating that the company's goal was to make software development of all but the largest projects feasible by a single person, with the rest done by small teams. And then I looked at my own Agile-encrusted, Scrum-addled, Node-encumbered team, which could barely get a simple web app deployed in half a year, and I was like uhhhhhhh...

As always I think this problem is down to some people being producers and some people being consumers. We all produce and consume, but individuals do so in differing ratios.

I think it's especially something that happens as we age, too. I've noticed I've become more of a consumer as I get older, I work on fewer personal projects and spend less time thinking of things to build compared to consuming the work of others.

1. Technology is making us more productive! Way, way more productive. More or less all of the gains are captured by tech companies who make the technology.

2. Technology is not necessarily adopted for productivity. It is often adopted to facilitate legibility into the day to day activity of the organization. This is often at the expense of productivity! Moreover, this is often acceptable to management!

Because now for ex. everithing needs at least one or two klicks more. You wanna save a file in office. Now they try to force you to use Onedrive. If you wanna save it local, extra mouseclick. Windows menu, the animations are so slow .. I often clicked already a second time and the menu close right again, after it showed slowly up. Don't even start with Browser based apps ..

...Because new technology is not build for us but against us for a little group of IT giants interests... Simply.

Classic desktops are for productivity BUT they do not generate enough lock-in nor give their main devs such a tight grip as actual systems and so on.

Unfortunately to understand people need to know both models, witch is highly unlikely outside IT techies community and even unlikely inside it...

For one strong argument, see the current thread on Symbian source code, and practices at Nokia and within the mobile phone industry:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31491744

Turf-wars, naked competition, monopolistic practices, and secrecy all have much to answer for.

Because I think brain is the bottleneck, like I am feeling that there is people that is working today 12 hours a day, That has optimised notes, tools and workflow, but how much more work do you want to squeeze from humans, and then for what, so that they can be laid off when they’re not needed anymore? :0

What a joke, I'm literally reading this while my robot vacuum is cleaning the house.

Because nobody wants to make themselves or their friends obsolete. In fact, technical debt is a feature, not a bug. Invent a highly functional, durable tool: nobody will buy anything related to it from you again.

Generally, this seems to be rather asyncronous in large companies / "enterprises". I've seen entire departments that are not doing anything relevant. In less severe cases, there are still mostly a few people that do a lot of work, and many that are doing very little. Sort of like the pareto principle of productivity.

Because it is the wrong technology. Take project managent Saas for example. Every single one of them don't focus on the big picture. Not a single one tries to make users effective instead of efficient.

It is, we're just not being paid for it. https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

We have created something like building 1M pyramids of Giza on a piece of silicon the size of your thumbnail and people don't think it counts as progress because you can't see it.

Why Isn't _every_ new tech making us productive. Some definitely are, diff tracking like github, any comms software, accounting software etc do make us a lot more productive.

I think that productivity per actual second worked has drastically increased and people just don't work as much as they used to, at least in office jobs.

> Productivity, which is defined as the value of goods and services produced per hour of work

The technology is a quality of life improvement, not a $job improvement.

Technology is making us more productive. If your metric tells you it isn't so, then your metric is wrong.

https://archive.ph/7BmzY

What's the point of increasing productivity? Does higher productivity mean higher resource-conversion?

Just to keep up with population growth the economy needs to grow so there will be enough jobs, goods, and services per capita. If per capita wealth is to increase, not only do there need to be more workers but also more output per person. It's very hard for an economy to be steady state. You're either growing or dying.

Productivity growth is efficiency. 3% of people work in agriculture when before 100% of people were subsidence farmers. The entire modern economy is possible due to productivity gains in food production.

Capability != Productivity

Increasing capability means we can do more with less. So we choose to use less resources.

Then why is my attendence still required for 8 hours a day, in a field where working 4-6 hours would not significantly decrease my overall productivity, but increase my well-being and capability to build something on my own.

The limiting factor for productivity in the knowledge economy (or any work requiring creativity) hasn't been time for a while, why do we insist on keeping it where it has been since the tail end of the industrial revolution (or slightly earlier / later, depending on where you are).

It is, it also gives us more downtime during the workday that isn't reflected in the numbers.

I'm not sure this is true. There are accounts of incredible waste and normalized, office-wide work-dodging-while-pretending-to-work in the earliest years of the post-war white-collar office. They read like they could have been written yesterday, with a few of the details changed.

It could be that as more people moved into white-collar work, though, the fraction of the population experiencing and participating in that kind of thing has gone up.

Because as tech stack increases, complexity also increases. Just move it to the cloud :P

On the other hand productivity in the developing world has been spiking markedly.

Marx had a lot to say about this over 150 years ago...

the answer lies in that technology absolutely does make us more productive.

the benefits of that reduction in cost, however, tend to move upward rather than downward, at least when it comes to labor value.

this is basically chapter 1 from das kapital.

of course, these kind of articles serve as propaganda by comflating ideas and watering down the critical analysis.

Because we now have the equivalent of a TV set on our office desks.

It is.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...

Generally, because of Conway's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Also, because of Sturgeon's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

And my axe.

Personally I've put it down to:

- We _are_ actually far more productive, but capitalism means that the demands, rewards and expectations have scaled along side - e.g. mass inflation, house prices etc... meaning we haven't been able (allowed) to scale back out working hours.

- We are increasingly living in a world of increase choice and consumption pressure - we have more options and pressure to obtain goods and services than ever before - this is often not a good thing.

- Diminishing returns as we ratchet up optimisation over time, technology becomes more complex over time, not less.

The article is paywalled, so I'm just going by the title, but one thing holding back labor productivity is low wages. When wages are low, labor-saving technology is less likely to be cost-effective. It's funny when Hacker News' innovation-loving capitalists oppose minimum wages, since by doing so they are holding innovation back.

because there is no “us”; the people who run the world don’t want to lose their grip on power, so they use tech to make people stupider and thus less capable of challenging authority

This is such a dumb article.

Productivity is poorly defined and basically impossible to measure. So when discussing it forget any facts and just accept that you will have to talk about it like you do art...

If you regularly visited China over the last 30 years, you would have a clear and dramatic understanding of productivity.

No, I'd be even more confused:

I'd look at huge building projects and millions of resulting apartments that were built but now had no buyers and were sat empty on some zombie bank's balance sheet. And I would not know whether they were worth sticker price (and China was very productive) or nothing (and China was very unproductive) or anywhere in between.

I'd look at FoxConn with >350000 workers making some of the worlds most popular and profitable consumer electronics, but then I'd see they only make 3.6% profit in a country with >3.7% risk free rate of return and think: they're wasting their time and would be better being liquidated.

It's almost as if big chunks of China are run to keep people busy and employed and meet arbitrary central targets and not to make things people want at a price they will pay...

Actually understanding what productive means, and how to measure it is really really hard. And at every step companies and governments have all sorts of perverse incentives to disguise it.

> I'd look at huge building projects and millions of resulting apartments that were built but now had no buyers and were sat empty on some zombie bank's balance sheet. And I would not know whether they were worth sticker price (and China was very productive) or nothing (and China was very unproductive) or anywhere in between.

That's just being confused by propaganda. If you look back at all of the Chinese ghost city stories and note the names, virtually all of those cities are full and productive now. I always thought the stories were a line to make excuses for US lack of investment in infrastructure.

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