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I remember reading some comment by Peter Drucker, sometime in the early 90s, that at the time he estimated that the entire edifice of computing, viewed as an in
by ChainOfFools 4y ago
I remember reading some comment by Peter Drucker, sometime in the early 90s, that at the time he estimated that the entire edifice of computing, viewed as an investment by the global government, academic, military and business enterprise as a whole, could only demonstrate superficial, locally improved productivity but had never in fact paid off the investment overall and did not appear (at that time) to be tending toward it.
There's probably a tangent with the hot anthropological debate over whether agriculture has ever paid off for humanity as well.
- epups 4y agoI'm not sure how you measure investment in computing "as a whole", but I'm pretty sure this prediction is demonstrably wrong in any metric you choose. Imagine comparing a modern economy with that of a country that had not invested in computing at all - maybe Cuba would be the best example?
- ChainOfFools 4y agoI'm not an economist, so I don't know what productivity means in a technical sense. But I think optimizing for productivity may be missing the point, if it simply means some rate of product creation with respect to human and natural resource inputs. This I can see ending in the same old questions - what exactly did Plato mean by the good life, and how do we optimize for it as a species, or at least minimize suffering at the same scope.