Has Productivity Peaked? 291
Putney Barnes writes "A columnist on silicon.com is arguing that computing can no longer offer the kind of tenfold per decade productivity increases that have been the norm up to now as the limits of human capacity have been reached. From the article: 'Any amount of basic machine upgrading, and it continues apace, won't make a jot of difference, as I am now the fundamental slowdown agent. I just can't work any faster'. Peter Cochrane, the ex-CTO of BT, argues that "machine intelligence" is the answer to this unwelcome stasis. "What we need is a cognitive approach with search material retreated and presented in some context relative to our current end-objectives at the time." Perhaps he should consider a nice cup of tea and a biccie instead?"
Cough (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Cough (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Technology has now reached the point where it's increasing faster than I can keep up.
2. I now need technology to make up for deficiencies in my intellectual processes, as well as my work processes.
Happily, many kids today don't seem to have nearly as much problem as their parents/grandparents do with futureshock/infomation overload - having been raised in an age of rich media, near-ubiquitous networking and information-overload as a daily part of their lives, kids these days seem perfectly happy to keep up.
I don't see this as a huge problem for society, so much as for the older segment of it.
Of course, as development accelerates the age before which one can stay relevant is likely to drop, with interesting consequences - either we develop some kind of mental process-prosthesis to enable adults to continue interacting usefully with society, or we learn to live with the important decision makers of technology being pre-pubescent teens.
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Re:Cough (Score:4, Insightful)
What mindless babbling. In an age where we have to go to school longer and longer to acquire the skills for the technical and academic jobs, you honestly think that the ages are getting younger and younger?
Oh, wait, these kids grow up with computers. I forgot. What a technical wonder it is to run Windows. I often have to teach my kids how to do certain things on the computer that goes beyond surfing a web page. And these are teenagers.
But it's true - the older generation might be a little lost when it comes to myspace or whatever the next fad is.
BTWo, it's not a matter of "keeping up", it's a matter of ignoring/blocking more and more irrevelant information in your life. The signal to noise ratio is growing ever higher. I can spend time keeping up with the news, but 99% of that is a waste of time, especially since I'm not a politician. So it is with
Seriously, if I haven't read
Bad interfaces. (Score:3, Interesting)
What we need to do
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On the Other Hand (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how many people spend their entire working day browsing MySpace or Slashdot.
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Sounds like he's had an overdose of techno babble. The bean counters are telling him that he needs to upgrade the humans, and he can't. You can only lay down so many lego blocks in a day. Humans are not Robots, upgradable, programmable, disposable. We do not yet have an underclass of robots serving the billions of human masters that exist today on Planet E
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And yes, I know that on Widnows at least, you can turn all th
Effective training (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how few people know how to use a search engine effectively? Without the vocabulary to use the right search terms and narrowing characteristics, they get back page after page of irrelevant drivel. It takes them an hour or two to find what I can locate within a page or three.
I dislike the periodic push for AI enhancements. The approach encourages the further dumbing-down of the population, when what we need is to increase the education levels and effective intelligence (i.e. wise us
Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously Mr. Cochrane has never tried using Microsoft Vista.
Re:Obviously... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Second, My view is that the author has a sterile view of what productivity is. If we limit productivity to typing in sales figures - then sure, were well into the diminishing returns; however if you're talking about recording multi-track music, or godforbid editing HDTV, then we're still a long way from the end of the trail. The question might be WHAT technology is expected to improve in the mid-term. Personally,
Centuries-old saw (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar lack of imagination has been expressed in many contexts over the years.
And, by the way, who says that 'productivity' is a useful measure of anything?
Re:Centuries-old saw (Score:5, Interesting)
When you're talking about productivity in the entire economy, you can draw a graph - on the Y axis is "real GDP per capita" while on the X axis is "capital / labor" (K/L for short). If you add more capital (machines, computers, tools) people get more productive, but less so as you add more and more and more. This means the line you graph will start somewhat steep, but then level off as you get higher (not entirely unlike the graph of sqrt(x)). The rough guideline for the economy at present is the "rule of one third" - if you increase your capital stock by 100%, you'll get about 33% more output. This sort of rule determines how much capital we end up having - we will increase our capital stock with investment until we have reached the "target rate of return", which is actually a slope of this productivity curve. This is the point at which investment pays for itself.
Then there are wonderful things like increases in technology. These end up shifting the productivity curve upward: people can do more with their technology than they could before. This increases real GDP per capita directly, but it also means that for the same level of capital, we're below the target rate of return, and can invest in all sorts of new capital, which will pay for itself - so we increase our capital stock as well.
The good news is that technology keeps coming, and while it may not be quite the same Spectacular Breakthrough as the introduction of computers, there is plenty happening in a variety of industries. Take, for example, Wal*Mart (the company everyone loves to hate, yes...) They have achieved a substantial portion of their success by becoming more productive with managing their warehouses and inventories, and are actively looking to increase their productivity in this area. (In fact, I've seen studies that claim they were responsible for the bulk of retail productivity growth in the late 90's, directly or indirectly). "Supply chain management" is trendy. And perhaps some day we will see RFID tags at the check-out line (to replace the last great checkout productivity enhancer, bar codes).
Re:Centuries-old saw (Score:4, Insightful)
1. You can do that on a computer!
2. Nah it is easier this way.
#1 is just from ignorance and assume if the Job is difficult for them to do that it will be difficult for the computer to do. Conversely they also assume if it is simple for a person to do it is simple for a computer to do.
#2 I normally get that if it is the persons primary job or they like doing these tasks. So a program will improve their lively hood.
A common fallacy is that computer makes our lives easier. It makes us more productive by doing the work on all the easy mind numbing tasks. Giving us more time to focus on the hard stuff, that requires more thinking. There is much room for improving productivity. Technologies such as character/speach recognition, Improvements in robotics, Business Intelligence.
Go and ask almost any mid size company if they can give you list of the top selling items by State, or by City. I bet most wouldn't be able to do that. And that is just some simple database queries. There is a lot of room for expansion. We tend for fail to see it because we are now use to the speed that things change. Just think about the power the newest laptops now. And compare them to the servers 5 years ago. Each core is now over 3-4 times faster and now we have duel core laptops. So a system back in 2001 with that amount of juice would cost over $10,000 (Figuring 8 CPU Systems with 3 GB of RAM, 100GB Drives, DVD/CD RW) 17" LCD Screen (Well lets make it 2 to match the resolution...) That is just 5 years ago. A single person now has enough power to run a mid size company 5 years ago. We just don't realize the change because we are use to moving up at the same speed. As computers are improving so is our skills with our job. So as we get better at our job we also get better tools that help up improve them.
All this is assuming that your company is not one of those cheap bastards who don't want to get new programs because they don't see value in it.
Re:Centuries-old saw (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure about that. The difficulty lies in getting a good programmer and whether or not a program is worth the cost.
I think there's no shortage of consultants who do nothing but fleece small business by coming in with an automated solution that is either an excel macro or some craptackular access database which are usually flakey, crash-prone, half-assed, and difficult to backup properly. Not to mention it ties them more into the MS monopoly.
Even if you find yourself a good app developer there are costs to consider. If it still cheaper to do it by hand, then why bother? Especially considering the glut of labor in the US. Heck, people go to college, get saddled with loans, and are happy to take 30,000 a year jobs. Toss in all the foreign workers chopping at the bit to come here too. From a business perspective having them do the same old makes financial sense and I'm sure some people look at automation with some amount of fears as it might make them redundant.
Re:Centuries-old saw (Score:4, Interesting)
The difficulty lies in getting a good programmer and whether or not a program is worth the cost.
I agree that it is too difficult to get a skilled programmer, but I think almost always it will be worth the cost.
Even if you find yourself a good app developer there are costs to consider. If it still cheaper to do it by hand, then why bother? Especially considering the glut of labor in the US. Heck, people go to college, get saddled with loans, and are happy to take 30,000 a year jobs. Toss in all the foreign workers chopping at the bit to come here too. From a business perspective having them do the same old makes financial sense and I'm sure some people look at automation with some amount of fears as it might make them redundant.
In the short term, yes, it may make sense to stick with a person doing the job. But in the long run, automation will be more profitable. For example, imagine it takes $90K to write the software to replace the job of a $30K/year worker. That will pay for itself in three years and by year four, the investment will have a positive ROI. While you're still paying that $30K worker, I'm getting the work done for free. Also, since I'm assuming this $30K worker has some intelligence, some ideas, and some skills in the marketplace, by automating his mundane job, I can now turn him lose on more interesting projects. He can help lead new product lines, while you are still paying his equivalent to just do repetitive tasks that are only fit for a computer.
I think the real challenges and hesitation from people to move to an automated system is from familiarity with the old system or fear/experience of failure with an automated system. All it takes is one bad experience - a poorly written program that crashes one day and wipes out weeks of data since the backups weren't setup properly, for example - and many decision makers will insist on more manual approaches. Another factor may be that some business partner or regulating agency requires that work be performed in a particular mannere or that certain items be made available that essentially have to be done by humans. I work on software for the health care industry, and some of the "complexities" in dealing with the county and state agencies greatly reduce the amount of automation that can be applied to a given task.
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No, come to think of it, I'd rather have a nickel for every "Why don't they design games for women?" or "Why aren't there more women in IT?" posts.
-Eric
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Anyone who deals with the real world understands that if you're looking for the next big thing, you should look at existing technological concepts. The ones that will receive widespread adoption as costs comes down (e.g. mobile phones), or where someone figures out the "trick" (e.g. Google), and generally where it gets past the early adoptor phase. (note: situation is different if you are actually the technologist t
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Note to self: Don't fuck up when flaming another. And read the goddamned preview post before hitting submit.
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I say that 'productivity' is a useful measure. It measures how much stuff you make or do with your time. If two people make toy blocks, the more 'productive' one ends up with a bigger pile of blocks at the end of the work day. If you want a way to measure that, 'productivity' is your guy.
It's useful, e.g., because you might employ block-makers. You need something to base performance reviews on. You might decide to pay the
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Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899 (attributed)
(And yes I know that he probably didn't actually say that. But I saw it on the Internet so it must be true.)
Has he installed Vista yet? (Score:3, Funny)
The myth of 'productivity' (Score:4, Interesting)
My local lawyer, for example, used to get about 20% of the town's law traffic 10 years ago. It's now computerized and processes far more documents and communications, at a far faster rate, than it ever used to. It still gets about 20% of the town's law traffic, as its competitors have upgraded in exactly the same way. The courts, of course, recieve far more documents and messages from these lawyers than they ever used to, but the courts themselves have also computerized (just barely) and can handle the extra traffic.
In terms of 'productivity', I'd think that the lawyers, paralegals, court administrators and so on have improved by 10 times. In terms of how much useful stuff gets done, it's exactly constant.
So yeah, by all means integrate Google technology with your cornflakes to achieve a further tenfold increase in productivity. Go right ahead.
In more important news, I currently have a co-worker who spends all day reading his friend's blogs (which doesn't bother me) and giggling over the witty posts he finds (which is driving me fucking mad). Can any slashdotters suggest a solution that will not result in jail or in me being considered 'not a team player'?
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And in a law office, that constant is 0.
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Or you can do what I do: Headphones + Viking Death Metal.
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For example, here at work, I created a several thousand line WordBASIC macro which 16 times a year crunches a ~200 pg. Word manuscript, setting about 90% of the text to have the correct style / formatting --- the remaining 10% has to be done by hand, but it's a quick search to find it, and I've created a button bar to make each style assignment a single click (why there isn't a default Word tool
Parameters (Score:2)
Good point -- my requirements were vague. The requirement is to get him to stop laughing, or drastically reduce the giggle frequency. It's currently about 100-150 a day, but clustered; there'll be one every minute for a while, then none for hours.
Music won't work, as I have no sound source available and I just can't work while listening to music because I get too into the music.
'Nuclear' solutions such as reporting him to the boss aren't good as this is a small freindly company and I don't really want to
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If your co-worker isn't as technically literate as you, I recommend getting the site blocked. If it's a small company, kill it at the router (just add it to the blocked sites list yourself, no one will be the wiser). If it's a large company, talk to the network admin in charge of the proxy/firewall (under the guise of lost productivity attributed to employees using company assets for personal reasons).
It's simple and effective.
Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, once we've invented AI that can do our jobs, the whole human race is pretty much redundant. Sounds like the next logical evolutionary step. They'll look back on us as The Flesh Age and perhaps keep a few of us as pets (or stuffed humans in a museum). Beyond that, our usefulness is exhausted.
I love the smell of optimism burning in the morning.
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Unless that AI can self-replicate, our new jobs will be building and maintaining that AI.
We are now in the situation you describe, except with machines and labor. It used to be that we toiled in the field with sticks and rakes, smacking oxen on the back to keep them moving. Now, we ride in air-conditioned cabs of giant combines, listening to satellite radio and resting our buttocks on a leather seat, wat
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Not quite. There are lots of things that we could use AI for to help us do our jobs better -- as technology is supposed to do for us in the first place. Think of a plow, or a tractor, or even the computer in the first place. How the hell do you think programming or systems administration was done before computers?
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Your certainty is misplaced. Computer engineering is a whole lot easier than upgrades through neurosurgery. For one thing, we barely understand how the brain works as it is, and there's no reason to think that improvements in computers will correlate in any way whatsoever with improvemen
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The improvements to computers may not make people's brains work better, but one application that fills a need can make it possible for someone to do something they barely understand. The greater the capabilities of the average computer, the more resources that are available f
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Hawking warns us [zdnet.co.uk] that this is the only way (as humans) we could compete with strong AI [wikipedia.org].
Imagine the creation of strong AI that can either self-replicate (or figure out how to self replicate). Would its rate of improvement exceed our ability to modify ourselves to match? Given how hard it currently is t
hardware productivity may have peaked (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the current trend in software is not intelligent software, but software that allows us to enlist our collective intelligence, or collaboration software, such as wikis, sharepoint, simultaneously edited spreadsheets, etc.
The author of TFA that makes so much use of the word I: he should start to think in term of us, and install the software that allows him to productively do so. Then he will see he starts departing the stassis he feels he is in.
Give him what he deserves! (Score:3, Funny)
He deserves a paperclip jabbed in his eye, or even worse, somebody turn on his MS Office assistant and unlease the fury of Clippy on his ass!
Value (Score:2)
There is an increasing amount of free valuable stuff created by people for next to nothing. I wouldn't want to be a publisher ten years from now, but anticipate huge shifts in how we assign value to effort and increases in
Human interfaces get better (Score:2, Insightful)
Wrong presupposition (Score:2)
Re:Wrong presupposition..sorry (Score:2)
Re:Wrong presupposition (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just curious as to what is meant by 'productivity' anyway. I hate the numbers that are thrown around in the media. I want to see hard numbers like "bushels of produce per man-hour" and things like that - not something in silly relative units like dollars of economic activity (especially when a lot of economic activity is actually not 'productive' at all - for instance, selling a house in my mind is not productivity, but building a house is. Heck, if selling a house was 'productive', I could just keep selling a house back and forth between two parties and be the most productive real-estate agent in the universe - except that nothing actually changed. Note that I don't mean that selling a house isn't valuable; it's just not, in my mind, related to productivity).
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Selling a house can be productive, in that it helps two parties both better align their resources with their needs. By facilitating this alignmen
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No man is an island (Score:2)
Re:No man is an island (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been to one of his talks as well. He is not years ahead of the rest of us, he is full of bollocks. Have you read one of BT's future predictions documents? (Which I believe come out of Cochrane's department) They are full of things like "in 20 years time, we will control computers with our minds, and we won't have lunch, we'll eat a pill!" If you find the stuff he says to be visionary, you don't have much imagination...
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Re:No man is an island (Score:5, Informative)
The latest technology timeline released by BT suggests hundreds of different inventions for the next few decades including:
* 2012: personal 'black boxes' record everything you do every day
* 2015: images beamed directly into your eyeballs
* 2017: first hotel in orbit
* 2020: artificial intelligence elected to parliament
* 2040: robots become mentally and physically superior to humans
* 2075 (at the earliest): time travel invented
So, according to BT research, in 14 years time we are going to have computers sitting in parilament, in 34 years time there are going to be robots that are mentally superior to us and I may see time travel invented in my lifetime. Sorry if I don't take this stuff seriously. Wasn't it fashionable to predict this kind of thing in the 1950's?
Yes, some of their shorter term predictions are better, but I can make good short term predictions too.
Inflation (Score:2)
Why (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why people worry about productivity is because the World Economy is related to it.
Inflation is closely linked to productivity. If workers are more efficient, there is lower cost of paying them. Which mean that costs of services are lower, and inflation is stopped. Currently, it is looking as though producitivity can no longer be relied on to keep inflation low... i.e. a recession/depression is coming.
Also people like to
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Think about the associated human costs, are you
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William
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Business has a social obligation to support the societies that it parasitizes.
And most businesses do. But a business can only support a parasitic society, if it is competitive.Brunner: The Limits of Human Endurance (Score:2)
John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider [wikipedia.org]
Too Much Information? Bollocks! (Score:4, Interesting)
So how to solve an unsolvable problem? Rephrase it! IMO, the problem isn't "too much information", as that's already been solved by the "biocomputer" we all watch the Simpsons with: our senses/brains already process "too much information" handily, but with lots of errors. No, the problem is that we're using the wrong approach to what we call "information" in the first place! We're rather fond of numbers (numeric forms of representation), as they've been around for around eight thousand years, and words (linear forms of representation) go back even farther. Pictures, music, etcetera store far more information (qualitative, structural forms of representation), but usually get mapped back to bitmaps, byte counts, and Shannon's information theory when this discussion starts. And that's the heart of it right there: everyone assumes that reducing (or mapping) everything to numbers is the only way to maintain objectivity, or measure (functional) quality.
Here's a challenge: is there a natural way to measure the "information-organizing capability" of a system? Meaning some approach/algorithm/technique simple enough for a kid or grandparent to understand, that most human beings will agree on, and that puts humans above machines for such things as recognizing pictures of cats (without having to have "trained" the machine on a bajillion pictures first). [Grammars are a reasonable start, but you have to explain where the grammars come from in the first place, and what metric you want to use to optimize them.]
A constant insistence/reliance on numeric measurements of accomplishment just ends up dehumanizing us, and doesn't spur the development of tools to deal with the root problem: the lack of automatic and natural organization of the "too much information" ocean we're sinking in. If we're not a little bit careful, we'll end up making things that are "good enough" -- perhaps an AI, perhaps brain augmentation, [insert Singularity thing here] -- as this is par for the course in evolutionary terms. But it's not the most efficient approach; we already have brains, let's use 'em to solve "unsolvable" problems by questioning our deep assumptions on occasion!
Disclaimer: the research group [cs.unb.ca] I work with (when not on "programming for profit" breaks, heh) is investigating one possible avenue in this general direction, a mathematical, structural language called ETS, which we hope will stimulate the growth of interest in alternative forms of information representation.
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Peter Cochrane reads too much sci-fi (Score:2)
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Much of our Sci-Fi has come true because WE aimed for it. Star Trek Comms anybody? They're called cell phones now. When will they link back to a desktop supercomputer? I figure it wont be that long.
And look at how powerful our computers are now. They're amazing. Id dare to claim that just one of our desktops are just as powerful as the whole world of machines 20 years ago. How much more powerful do they become before they equal human intelligence? From that "Moore's Law" (which was an observation, not
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Actually most of it hasn't, we just notice the stuff that has. What about antimatter driven warp engines? Transporters?
Anyway , star trek comms were little advanced from the walkie talkies that existed in the 60s anyway!
"Id dare to claim that just one of our desktops are just as powerful as the whole world of machines 20 years ago"
I'm guessing you weren't around 20 years ago then. The supercom
Solution : (Score:2)
(only a solution if you think the increase should continue)
New World of Work (Score:2)
Of course nobody can deliver on this today
HW may slow it's pace... (Score:2, Funny)
Variance amongst workers (Score:2)
In France, the government found that some surgeons were able to acheive 12x as many procedures as others at the same quality level[1]. This is the basis of the NHS reforms in the UK [bbc.co.uk]. i.e. Provide a system to encourage the 12x surgeons/other-staff to succeed.
So one way to increase productivity is to identify those 12x people, and find less demanding work for the <12ers. This is done by h
Cochrane? (Score:3, Funny)
Depends on your profession (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a lot of people working in the sciences who think differently, though. Chemists, biologists, physicists, could all do well with, not just smarter programs, but faster computers. As a couple of simple examples: Molecular mechanics modeling for chemists and protein folding modeling for biologist (particularly the latter, and both are related), are insanely computationally intensive and if computers were able to provide the results in 1/10th or 1/100th of the time, it would make a big difference in their ability to get things done. So I think it kind of depends what you do. I mean, let's face it, if you're a secretary, a faster word processor isn't going to make you 10 times more productive. Maybe a faster copier would help...
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You don't spend any time searching for solutions to problems, dealing with customers?
Not knowing your response, do you think by any chance that it would be possible to save time doing the above?
...limits of human capacity have been reached... (Score:2)
"Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity. But improve man, you gain a thousandfold."
-Khan Noonian Singh
We've already got a good start on it. [wikipedia.org]
Chunks / Levels of abstraction (Score:2)
Define 'productive' for a CTO (Score:2)
There is still a ton of manual busy work that could be automated or sped up in most corporations. There's a lot more that could be done.
I've been in the business twenty five years (Score:3, Interesting)
Mostly we are talking about marginal improvements -- although these are often not to be sneezed at. Margins are where competition takes place; they're where they difference between profitability and unprofitability, or positive cash flow and negative cash flow are determined. For things that are done on massive scales, marginal improvements add up. But even doubling actual productivity?
What IT mainly does is shift expectations. When I started work in the early 80s, business letters and memos were typed. Now we expect laser printed output or emails. A laser printed letter doesn't have 10x the business impact of a typed letter. An email gets there 1000x faster than an express package, but it seldom has 1000x the business impact when looked at from the standpoint of the economy as a whole. You only have to use email because your competition is using it as well, and you can't afford a competitive differential in speed.
Many changes created by information technology are imponderable. For example, one great difference between the early 80s and today is that there are far fewer secretarial staff. Memos and letters used to be typed by specialists who often were responsible for filing as well. Now these tasks are most done by the author, arguably eliminating a staff position. On the other hand, the author spends much more time dealign with computer and network problems; not only is his time more expensive than the secretarial time on a unit basis, he also needs the support of highly paid technical staff.
Some technology mediated changes are arguably negative: We used to set deadines for projects based on the delivery time plus a margin for delivery. Now it's common for proposals and reports to be worked on up to the last possible minute.
There are, no doubt, many substantial business savings created by new practices enabled by technology. Outsourcing, specialization, accurate and precise cost of sales, these are things that over time may have a huge impact.
oil industry example (Score:2)
Much
Peaked? (Score:2)
Hell, no.
The Black Hole of Meaning (Score:2)
our current end-objectives at the time.
At a concept-expansion factor of 2.0000 (end = objective, current = at the time), we have reached the semantic Schwarzchild radius. Make yourselves ready and prepare to cross and traverse the meaning horizon!
Yes, if we follow his obscure assumptions (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, productivity has peaked if we adhere to his non-standard assumptions and definitions. His first assumption is that everyone is like him. I assume he's a writer, which involves a higher ratio of higher thinking to mundane tasks than average. I see EAI and data processing put people out of work (or allow an exisitng team to process more data) every day in the busines world.
Even if we focus on his narrow world, he says that a better search engine would help his job. But he labels all such improvements as "machine intelligence" and declares them out of bounds for the point he's trying to make which is that hardware alone will not improve his personal productivity. He's basically declaring all software improvements as out of bounds in order to declare the "peak of productivity".
Finally, I bet his productivity has improved since 2004 despite his protestations to the contrary. Wikipedia is much faster than search engines to get a neutral concise summary and handful of the most relevant links. Shall we take away the author's access to Wikipedia? He obviously doesn't need it.
Ah ha (Score:3, Funny)
Is it so damn hard to to say "we need a new approach"?
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word and phrase he can find it'll somehow give his ideas more gravitas. To me it actually says
style over substance but each to their own.
Goals (Score:2)
I was never too keen on helping McDonald's require fewer people in the production of Happy Meal toys, and I'm not too sure I want AK-47 production (or M-16 production, for that matter) to be much cheaper either.
I give up (Score:2)
What we need is a cognitive approach with search material retreated and presented in some context relative to our current end-objectives at the time.
What the hell am I supposed to do with that statement? If this is the mindset that will produce the next generation of "thinking machines" then sign me up for the Butlerian Jihad.
If productivity per man-hour has increased .... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you were willing to give up all these advanced toys which have now become ordinary, you might be able to get by just fine on the salary from a shorter workweek.
Teleworking (Score:4, Insightful)
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1995 called and they want their Windows jokes back.
hold on... apparently 2001 is calling and they want their "1995 called..." jokes back.
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Been there, done that.. at least to the point of it making fewer mistakes then I'd do myself. When I started experimenting with dictation some 15 years ago, it required special hardware, not so anymore.
I took it to the point of writing many letters and articles that way, and even using it for text based games (mud).
Interesting? sure. Usefull also in specific c
Naturally Speaking (Score:2)
Furthermore, the company announced that it's next version would be able to accurately transcribe a conversation between two people without getting confused.
I think you're going to see speech-powered devices increase in popularity dramatically now that there's no training involved. The expansion of voice-powered syst
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StarCrack! (Score:2)
Any reason an old dude can't compete with young Koreans at SC?
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on land that SHOULD have been allowed to lay fallow for many years.
Well, I don't know about that, but I do know the position the Netherlands holds in this list [mapsofworld.com] is pretty much due to a much higher productivity in agriculture being possible then is achieved almost anywhere else in the world. (Note that this productivity is achieved on a small part of a tiny and quite densely populated country, and by approx 60000 people (4% of the populati