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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive: I can bank from my pocket, review the best photos out of 100k+ just when riding a tram, get virtually any good produced anywhere delivered to my doorstep in 1-3 business days (and it will be the exact kind and make I chose, not something that happened to be available), read virtually any book ever published while my appointment is delayed.

However, almost all of these are purely private benefits that do not show in any ledger. This is at least in part why the Internet seems to have had such small impact on gdp.

How about AI? So far, even more private benefits than the Internet.

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And most of the time savings gained from all this is blown on grind clicking "social media" so net effect is, yes, close to zero (or in more modern terms, not 100x, not 10x, but 1x at most).

Value is subjective, though. If you actually gave people an ultimatum to stop using AI tools for a year, with a negotiable price, I wonder what that would come out at. Many other personal goods are like this, they are valued highly but do not appear as commercial transactions.

I mean that’s to you as well as spending your time at the swimming pool.

> I think the speedups and conveniences of modern IT and the Internet have been massive

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." — Robert Solow (1987), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

A revisit in 1999:

* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

Internet and AI profoundly increase an individual’s potential productivity. The difference between these technologies and those of the Industrial Revolution is that the earlier advancements were essentially democratic. Everyone benefitted from them, in ways that were quite obvious. Whereas with the newer technologies, an individual can start a unicorn from his laptop, but he can also waste his life doomscrolling.

The Industrial Revolution was basically the height of western civilization, and the modern revolution is the beginning of something else. It’s not surprising that the metrics we developed in the previous civilization can’t really account for the gains we’re seeing now.

> I can bank from my pocket

My opinion on that is, it's not such a big gain compared to legacy banking with checks, phone calls etc. All the operations you can do now you could do with legacy banks, just a bit slower. Given banking is not something you do every second, the overall speedup is tiny.

When I was a kid, my dad would schedule a monthly visit to the bank. This is one afternoon freed. With 21 in the month, solid 4% of afternoons saved to do something else. Plus the peace of mind because you can check whatever you want whenever you want.

With e-commerce my shopping is down to just groceries. Clothes, electronics, tools, spare parts, furniture, all show up at my door magically without hunting them down in stores. I remember a small repair being half a day. It's an hour now.

My dad certainly did not and could not have maintained a 12 cafe outings a month habit. I can do it with a newborn. Still probably deflationary compared to his activity.

Banking from your phone isn't as transformative as just banking. It's incremental.

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