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Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and u

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone down over the last 15 years. Despite the fact that we’ve had trillion dollar corporate behemoths now. Despite that fact that we’re enabling a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t imagines. Despite the polarization we see. And teen anxiety going through the roof along teen/pre-teen suicides. When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…

bnralt 3y ago
> When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant… That person gave a list of tech they were talking about in their comment immediately afterwards: "speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day." I'm not sure it's worth quibbling over whether we should use the term "everywhere" or "in many places"; the general point stands that it's found many different uses, and has done what effective tech does - fade into the background in many cases, just becoming part of our daily lives. Sure, we're not seeing the off the wall predictions from the singularity crowd, but it seems to be tech that most people find broadly useful.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
evrydayhustling 3y ago
The missing productivity paradox is something that should interest everyone in tech! Like any macroeconomic observation, there is plenty of uncertainty in both the measurements (GDP ain't perfect) and the context (2 financial crises and a pandemic). But even pro-status-quo institutions like Brookings agree that Something Is Up. Their 2021 review on the topic is both a decent summary and a good source of further refs [1]. My favorite explanation is that many new technologies end up redistributing wealth rather than creating it, which certainly tracks with both subjective and quantified growth in inequality on the same time period. However, a slightly more optimistic take is that tech is aligning production better with people's preferences, so that the same productivity enables people to live more distinct lifestyles that suit them. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-of-missing-productivity-growth/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-o...
- adriand 3y ago
  Another explanation that I find persuasive, put forward by Ezra Klein, is that productivity-sapping uses of technology grew along with the productivity-boosting ones: social media, for example, is a powerful mechanism for distracting people and destroying their attention spans. If this is a good explanation, it begs the question of what AI might do to destroy productivity as well. If you’re constantly sexting with your AI girlfriend, who just happens to be extraordinary adept at tapping into your sexual proclivities, maybe you won’t get as many support tickets resolved as your boss was hoping. More hypothetically, I would also expect that a world in which people spend a lot of time with screens strapped to their head, consuming an infinite stream of entertainment provided by generative AI, is not going to produce higher GDP.
  - evrydayhustling 3y ago
    > More hypothetically, I would also expect that a world in which people spend a lot of time with screens strapped to their head, consuming an infinite stream of entertainment provided by generative AI, is not going to produce higher GDP. Yeah, I think this dovetails with the idea that IT may be satisfying preference allocations without increasing overall production. Watching 10 movies a month on a streaming service adds much less to the GDP than going to the cinema 10x, but if the selection is better it might satisfy you more. Economists sometimes attempt to measure this with "utility adjustments" which recognize increasing quality in the same goods, but it's very hard for those adjustments to account for the hidden preferences of the consumers as opposed to objective qualities of a good or service. Information goods like social media and streaming, financial services like pay-me-later, and conveniences like next-day delivery are all examples of activities that might suit preferences without showing up in GDP. They also may enable distraction, waste, reclusiveness and impulsiveness in ways we'd like to avoid as a society. At the same time they might also help some people feel more included and less lonely or trapped by circumstance.
  - adregan 3y ago
    > put forward by Ezra Klein The explanation sounds pretty familiar, so I might have already read/heard this from Klein, but would you mind sharing a link?
sdenton4 3y ago
I've seen some indication that this is a measurement problem. Tech enables computers to do things that would be originally expensive for humans to do. Translation is an interesting example: some labor has been displaced, but not nearly all because there's still value in having human eyes carefully checking the translation of high value documents. But free translation let's regular people translate things freely - a new capability which displaced no one. However, productivity measures human productivity and human labor. The very cheap new translation modality is therefore completely missed by productivity measurements. Meanwhile, there's /more/ jobs available right now, despite all of this. The US has hit a historic low in unemployment and wages are going up, leading to a decline in measured productivity. Productivity is output per dollar of wages, which means we twist our hands in anxiety when workers start doing better...
DonHopkins 3y ago
Maybe you live in a monolinguistic bubble, or speak every language fluently, but when is the last time you hired a human being to translate a language you don't understand instead of using AI like Google Translate? AI is already so ubiquitous and useful that you blindly take it for granted without even thinking.
- bannedbybros 3y ago
  [dead]
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Most companies will at least hire a human to check translation work, or at least contract one. Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market, and translation tools are not so fine grained to take into account dialect. Spanish, for example, has many examples of words that are innocuous in one dialect and profane in another.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    > Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market Bad translations are present in product names & descriptions of at least 70% of all products on Amazon and Ebay I've seen, and it doesn't look like it hurts the business in any way.
    - notahacker 3y ago
      Have you seen their sales revenues? Big difference between "buy this $5 plastic crap widget despite its product description being barely coherent because there's only so many seconds you're willing to spare searching for 'Plastic Crap Widget' because Familiar Tech Company's algorithm puts CBSPOO ahead of VRIENGLU in this particuar search parameter combo" and "hello professionals in niche market. You will recognise the name of our product whenever you next have $xx,xxx to spend on these services, because we were the one whose ad was inadvertently extremely sexist"
    - JohnFen 3y ago
kolinko 3y ago
GDP is not productivity. If I manage to produce/sell a hundred gizmos for $1 each, displacing my competition who were producing/selling 50 gizmos for a price of $5 each, I just halvened gdp produced even though both me and people using the gizmo are more productive than before.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  But your customers now have money to spend on something else. The money didn’t disappear.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I think precisely the point is that money isn't wealth. Government can print as much of the latter as they want; wealth goes up when we can collectively buy more and down when we can collectively buy less, regardless of how many dollarpounds that is. But GDP is measured in money, and can only connect to wealth if we get get inflation right, but that's really hard because inflation depends on what you want to buy — childcare costs don't matter if you have no kids of that age. That said, I trust the domain experts to get this right, even though the various governments may be incentivised to claim their own preferred numbers. Even at worst, they'll have thought of vastly more influences than I can even imagine.
Roark66 3y ago
Especially in translation quality. Being able to run high quality translation model that does 100 languages directly without going through English on a desktop pc with a previous gen gpu (2070 in my case) is huuuuge. (I'm talking about fairseq and m2m100 for anyone interested in spinning up their own). If I was going to name the biggest good thing AI has done to humanity so far is the ability to read internet sites in other languages like Chinese (Google sucks at it, you have to use other tools, I use an app called "tap translate screen"). Also ability to do voice to text and translation at the same time on mobile devices (currently requires online connection).
lallysingh 3y ago
AI affects both human interfaces (text, speech, sound, images) and the ability to interpret and create data by/for humans. That's effectively the entire interface space between machine and the human-experienced world. Can you think of an area of technology that won't be affected by AI? Even unrelated technologies are going to get affected in their interfaces and tooling. As for the rest of your comment... please don't hijack other conversations for soapboxing on the industry as a whole. Instead, submit your post and open a real conversation.
shmel 3y ago
Why does GDP measure anyway? How much money do we create for billionaires? My life is permeated by tech (and big part of it is AI) and made 100 times easier. I can buy a plane ticket to another country while waiting for a subway (did people use to take an hour to go to a special place, wait in line and talk to human to buy a ticket? I still remember this). I go there and quickly navigate in a city I know next to nothing about, find something niche, like cool local cafés in the area because GPS and google maps. I go to a restaurant and I can use google translate to understand the menu. I don't even need to type unfamiliar words, AI scans the image and translates it on the fly. The same google translate with speech recognition AI helps me to converse with a person when we don't share any common language. I can click couple of buttons and video-call my mum who lives on the other side of the world. If I need to buy something I need very rarely, I can order it online and not think where I find a shop that sells those things. Even if I don't know the right word, I can now ask chatgpt "what do you call in German that fancy thing you mount on the ceiling and attach lights to it?" My life is _hugely_ more efficient thanks to tech and AI. Does it help me to contribute more to the abstract economic growth? I don't know, perhaps not. But I just don't care about GDP.
ben_w 3y ago
> GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced I lack the economics knowledge to do more than parrot the response I've heard to this, so take this with the appropriate level of "hmmm": As I understand it, the counter-claim is that the measure of GDP mostly excludes exactly the set of things that grows absurdly fast. For example, the measure of inflation may include the cost of a smartphone in the standard basket of goods, but not the fact the GPU of a smartphone (or Apple TV) of today, operating in double precision mode, can do more than the Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer in 1993 costing 100 million dollars. Or that everyone has a free encyclopaedia a hundred times the size of the Encyclopædia Britannica. And maps which for most users are as good as Ordnance Survey, but free and worldwide, when the actual OS prices for just the UK is… currently discounted to £2,818.17, from £4,025.97. Or that getting you genome sequenced now costs a grand rather than 3 billion. Although that might not yet even be in the basket, I don't know where the actual baskets of goods get listed in most cases, and search results aren't helping — one result, on a government website, lists "health", but even digging into the spreadsheet didn't illuminate much detail there.
- xp84 3y ago
  > …genome costs… Source: This week’s Kurzgesagt, right?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Not only but also; this was a thing I was aware of this years back, but Kurzgesagt is a nice bit of easy watching when I'm eating dinner.
- tim333 3y ago
  That is true. Switching from buying Britannica to using Wikipedia is counted as a reduction in GDP as GDP counts what you spend and Wikipedia is free, even if it's better. The UK basket of goods is here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/ukconsumerpriceinflationbasketofgoodsandservices/2023#overview-of-basket-update https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/arti... and the various sublinks.
- 3y ago

bnralt 3y ago

> When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant… That person gave a list of tech they were talking about in their comment immediately afterwards: "speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day." I'm not sure it's worth quibbling over whether we should use the term "everywhere" or "in many places"; the general point stands that it's found many different uses, and has done what effective tech does - fade into the background in many cases, just becoming part of our daily lives. Sure, we're not seeing the off the wall predictions from the singularity crowd, but it seems to be tech that most people find broadly useful.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

evrydayhustling 3y ago

The missing productivity paradox is something that should interest everyone in tech! Like any macroeconomic observation, there is plenty of uncertainty in both the measurements (GDP ain't perfect) and the context (2 financial crises and a pandemic). But even pro-status-quo institutions like Brookings agree that Something Is Up. Their 2021 review on the topic is both a decent summary and a good source of further refs [1]. My favorite explanation is that many new technologies end up redistributing wealth rather than creating it, which certainly tracks with both subjective and quantified growth in inequality on the same time period. However, a slightly more optimistic take is that tech is aligning production better with people's preferences, so that the same productivity enables people to live more distinct lifestyles that suit them. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-of-missing-productivity-growth/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-solve-the-puzzle-o...

adriand 3y ago
Another explanation that I find persuasive, put forward by Ezra Klein, is that productivity-sapping uses of technology grew along with the productivity-boosting ones: social media, for example, is a powerful mechanism for distracting people and destroying their attention spans. If this is a good explanation, it begs the question of what AI might do to destroy productivity as well. If you’re constantly sexting with your AI girlfriend, who just happens to be extraordinary adept at tapping into your sexual proclivities, maybe you won’t get as many support tickets resolved as your boss was hoping. More hypothetically, I would also expect that a world in which people spend a lot of time with screens strapped to their head, consuming an infinite stream of entertainment provided by generative AI, is not going to produce higher GDP.
- evrydayhustling 3y ago
  > More hypothetically, I would also expect that a world in which people spend a lot of time with screens strapped to their head, consuming an infinite stream of entertainment provided by generative AI, is not going to produce higher GDP. Yeah, I think this dovetails with the idea that IT may be satisfying preference allocations without increasing overall production. Watching 10 movies a month on a streaming service adds much less to the GDP than going to the cinema 10x, but if the selection is better it might satisfy you more. Economists sometimes attempt to measure this with "utility adjustments" which recognize increasing quality in the same goods, but it's very hard for those adjustments to account for the hidden preferences of the consumers as opposed to objective qualities of a good or service. Information goods like social media and streaming, financial services like pay-me-later, and conveniences like next-day delivery are all examples of activities that might suit preferences without showing up in GDP. They also may enable distraction, waste, reclusiveness and impulsiveness in ways we'd like to avoid as a society. At the same time they might also help some people feel more included and less lonely or trapped by circumstance.
- adregan 3y ago
  > put forward by Ezra Klein The explanation sounds pretty familiar, so I might have already read/heard this from Klein, but would you mind sharing a link?

sdenton4 3y ago

I've seen some indication that this is a measurement problem. Tech enables computers to do things that would be originally expensive for humans to do. Translation is an interesting example: some labor has been displaced, but not nearly all because there's still value in having human eyes carefully checking the translation of high value documents. But free translation let's regular people translate things freely - a new capability which displaced no one. However, productivity measures human productivity and human labor. The very cheap new translation modality is therefore completely missed by productivity measurements. Meanwhile, there's /more/ jobs available right now, despite all of this. The US has hit a historic low in unemployment and wages are going up, leading to a decline in measured productivity. Productivity is output per dollar of wages, which means we twist our hands in anxiety when workers start doing better...

DonHopkins 3y ago

Maybe you live in a monolinguistic bubble, or speak every language fluently, but when is the last time you hired a human being to translate a language you don't understand instead of using AI like Google Translate? AI is already so ubiquitous and useful that you blindly take it for granted without even thinking.

bannedbybros 3y ago
[dead]
bobthepanda 3y ago
Most companies will at least hire a human to check translation work, or at least contract one. Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market, and translation tools are not so fine grained to take into account dialect. Spanish, for example, has many examples of words that are innocuous in one dialect and profane in another.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  > Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market Bad translations are present in product names & descriptions of at least 70% of all products on Amazon and Ebay I've seen, and it doesn't look like it hurts the business in any way.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    Have you seen their sales revenues? Big difference between "buy this $5 plastic crap widget despite its product description being barely coherent because there's only so many seconds you're willing to spare searching for 'Plastic Crap Widget' because Familiar Tech Company's algorithm puts CBSPOO ahead of VRIENGLU in this particuar search parameter combo" and "hello professionals in niche market. You will recognise the name of our product whenever you next have $xx,xxx to spend on these services, because we were the one whose ad was inadvertently extremely sexist"
  - JohnFen 3y ago

kolinko 3y ago

GDP is not productivity. If I manage to produce/sell a hundred gizmos for $1 each, displacing my competition who were producing/selling 50 gizmos for a price of $5 each, I just halvened gdp produced even though both me and people using the gizmo are more productive than before.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago
But your customers now have money to spend on something else. The money didn’t disappear.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I think precisely the point is that money isn't wealth. Government can print as much of the latter as they want; wealth goes up when we can collectively buy more and down when we can collectively buy less, regardless of how many dollarpounds that is. But GDP is measured in money, and can only connect to wealth if we get get inflation right, but that's really hard because inflation depends on what you want to buy — childcare costs don't matter if you have no kids of that age. That said, I trust the domain experts to get this right, even though the various governments may be incentivised to claim their own preferred numbers. Even at worst, they'll have thought of vastly more influences than I can even imagine.

Roark66 3y ago

Especially in translation quality. Being able to run high quality translation model that does 100 languages directly without going through English on a desktop pc with a previous gen gpu (2070 in my case) is huuuuge. (I'm talking about fairseq and m2m100 for anyone interested in spinning up their own). If I was going to name the biggest good thing AI has done to humanity so far is the ability to read internet sites in other languages like Chinese (Google sucks at it, you have to use other tools, I use an app called "tap translate screen"). Also ability to do voice to text and translation at the same time on mobile devices (currently requires online connection).

lallysingh 3y ago

AI affects both human interfaces (text, speech, sound, images) and the ability to interpret and create data by/for humans. That's effectively the entire interface space between machine and the human-experienced world. Can you think of an area of technology that won't be affected by AI? Even unrelated technologies are going to get affected in their interfaces and tooling. As for the rest of your comment... please don't hijack other conversations for soapboxing on the industry as a whole. Instead, submit your post and open a real conversation.

shmel 3y ago

Why does GDP measure anyway? How much money do we create for billionaires? My life is permeated by tech (and big part of it is AI) and made 100 times easier. I can buy a plane ticket to another country while waiting for a subway (did people use to take an hour to go to a special place, wait in line and talk to human to buy a ticket? I still remember this). I go there and quickly navigate in a city I know next to nothing about, find something niche, like cool local cafés in the area because GPS and google maps. I go to a restaurant and I can use google translate to understand the menu. I don't even need to type unfamiliar words, AI scans the image and translates it on the fly. The same google translate with speech recognition AI helps me to converse with a person when we don't share any common language. I can click couple of buttons and video-call my mum who lives on the other side of the world. If I need to buy something I need very rarely, I can order it online and not think where I find a shop that sells those things. Even if I don't know the right word, I can now ask chatgpt "what do you call in German that fancy thing you mount on the ceiling and attach lights to it?" My life is _hugely_ more efficient thanks to tech and AI. Does it help me to contribute more to the abstract economic growth? I don't know, perhaps not. But I just don't care about GDP.

ben_w 3y ago

> GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced I lack the economics knowledge to do more than parrot the response I've heard to this, so take this with the appropriate level of "hmmm": As I understand it, the counter-claim is that the measure of GDP mostly excludes exactly the set of things that grows absurdly fast. For example, the measure of inflation may include the cost of a smartphone in the standard basket of goods, but not the fact the GPU of a smartphone (or Apple TV) of today, operating in double precision mode, can do more than the Numerical Wind Tunnel supercomputer in 1993 costing 100 million dollars. Or that everyone has a free encyclopaedia a hundred times the size of the Encyclopædia Britannica. And maps which for most users are as good as Ordnance Survey, but free and worldwide, when the actual OS prices for just the UK is… currently discounted to £2,818.17, from £4,025.97. Or that getting you genome sequenced now costs a grand rather than 3 billion. Although that might not yet even be in the basket, I don't know where the actual baskets of goods get listed in most cases, and search results aren't helping — one result, on a government website, lists "health", but even digging into the spreadsheet didn't illuminate much detail there.

xp84 3y ago
> …genome costs… Source: This week’s Kurzgesagt, right?
- ben_w 3y ago
  Not only but also; this was a thing I was aware of this years back, but Kurzgesagt is a nice bit of easy watching when I'm eating dinner.
tim333 3y ago
That is true. Switching from buying Britannica to using Wikipedia is counted as a reduction in GDP as GDP counts what you spend and Wikipedia is free, even if it's better. The UK basket of goods is here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/ukconsumerpriceinflationbasketofgoodsandservices/2023#overview-of-basket-update https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/arti... and the various sublinks.
3y ago