Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There is this paradox of technology where despite a ton of technology it seems that productivity is not shooting up for society as a whole.

I'll try to find the article.

It looks more like technology is <<redistributing>> wealth, which is SUPER scary since technology inherently allows concentration.

Facebook killed 1 million newspapers, yay, now 1 American corporation can siphon all those profits to... no one even knows where, since it's probably parked in some tax haven. It created 10k jobs paid 500k each by killing 10 million jobs each paid 60k. I'm not super convinced the end result is better.

Edit:

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/produ...

> The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the peculiar observation made in business process analysis that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up. This observation has been firmly supported with empirical evidence from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

The link you pointed to doesn’t have any empirical data and the paper it links to doesn’t seem to load. Regardless, we’re 30 years from the 90s now and if anything it seems like productivity has been accelerating since then (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB), arguably because of technology.

Also, what’s the argument for Facebook killing newspapers? Craigslist was siphoning off a main source of newspaper revenue for papers long before Facebook arrived. Would you also argue against the end result of moving on from local classifieds sections?

Craigslist is US only.

Redistributing is not a problem that needs to be solved, raising the floor is.

The delta between floor and ceiling does not matter. Lift everyone up, this is not 0 sum.

> The delta between floor and ceiling does not matter

Yes it does. Relative power is a thing, even in a democracy.

> > this is not 0 sum

The important stuff absolutely is zero sum. Housing , p**y and bragging rights

> I'm not super convinced the end result is better.

He said from the warm comfort of his home, with a full belly, writing on a supercomputer created in SV, with software written in SV, on a platform build by SV on a global network created, of course, by the SV.

Would you give up technology then? Nobody stops you but I seriously doubt the productivity of hand-plowing fields is in any way higher than that of modern farm equipment.

Ah, the old "you can't criticize anything unless you're a luddite". Inevitably, you'd excuse them too cause they don't have experience. Make an actual argument.

Have you read the post I was replying to? It was a classic anti-tech Luddite statement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com