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Comment by apelapan | Hacker News Reader

Did the computer revolution really make things that much more efficient? Great savings and new possibilities on many fronts, but also enormous expenses and a whole lot of lost flexibility and individual agency.

I'm sure it is an efficiency win on the total, but perhaps not as gigantic as often assumed.

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Do you see typing pools in every large office anymore? Nope, word processors replaced all of them. Do accountants spend several weeks calculating desk sized spreadsheet by hand anymore? no because excel and other digital spreadsheets are able to tabulate data automatically. that's all major efficacy savings

Yep, major savings from those two things. But then someone in this efficient office decides to automate a few more workflows and spend 200k building a digital paper form that is used four times per year and misses a crucial field so that is not "supposed to be needed", so that every use of the form requires a phone call or five. This would not have happened with a paper form and human first recipient.

There is an efficiency gain in total, but a lot of losses that eat at the actual wins.

I mean, how much we talking here? We're not in Atlantis with flying cars, but there's immense efficiency gains in logistics.

That is a tricky one. I've been told early on that in most discussions one may not ask netzen to do anything for you.

We could have been mowing your lawn or filling my taxes. That is how I remember it anyway. If you just help drink my beer we both get things out of it.

GOOD point!

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