AI may have added basically zero to US economic growth, but tech sector productivity is 250%-300% of what is was before Claude Code was released because of all the 10x-20x engineers it created.
Definitely missing a /s
It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy.
Yep, and the same with the internet. During the 1990s and 2000s, people kept wondering why the internet wasn't showing up in productivity numbers. Many asked if the internet was therefore just a fad or bubble. Same as some now do with AI.
It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
It didn't take mobile apps with launch of the iPhone 20 years to add to the economy though, did it?
Why do I have a feeling that this will be ignored as biased by the people who need to read it the most.
It’s a grift being perpetuated by the folks at the top, who then sweep along in their slipstream folks under them, and so on. The folks who “need to hear this” are helpless to go against and so can’t back down, and the folks who don’t need to hear this because they’re driving it have their paychecks aligned to it, so they’re not backing down.
Why do you type like a bot?
Bottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy.
With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
In my working environment, people get dressed down for repeatedly communicating incorrect information. If they do it repeatedly in an automated fashion they will be publically shamed if they are senior enough.
I have no idea what benefit a human-in-loop for sending an automatically generated emails or agent generated sdks or buliding blocks has when there is no guarentee or even a probability of correctness attached to the result. The effort for vaildating and editing a generated email can be equally or greater than manually writing a regular email let alone one of certain complexity or significance.
And what do we do to create to try to guarentee a semblance of correctness? We add another layer of automated validation performed by, you guessed it, the same crew of wacky fuzzy operators that can inject correct sounding gibberish or business workflows at any moment.
It's almost like trying to build a house of cards faster than the speed with which it is collapsing. There seems to be a morbid fascination among even the best of us with how far things can be taken until this way forward leads to some indisputable catastrophe.
> a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
Is it possible that this sort of problem will be fixed? Hypothetically, what would happen in a scenario where one of these apps can do in 1 hr the work that would take a developer a month, reliably? Or is your premise that will NEVER happen?
I think it’s still a bit too early to draw the conclusion.
We need to get past the hype first and let the cash grabbers crash.
After that, with a clear mind we can finally think about engineering this technology in a sane and useful way.
The most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength.
I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.
The US economy is remarkably resilient considering its withstood a year of sabotage from the top down.
I completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job.
And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.
You can replace it with a much lower paid employee though.
I think this is key:
"On top of that, there is currently no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth."
AI may have added basically zero to US economic growth, but tech sector productivity is 250%-300% of what is was before Claude Code was released because of all the 10x-20x engineers it created.
Definitely missing a /s
It took 20 years for computers to "add" to the economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
Yep, and the same with the internet. During the 1990s and 2000s, people kept wondering why the internet wasn't showing up in productivity numbers. Many asked if the internet was therefore just a fad or bubble. Same as some now do with AI.
It takes time for technology to show measurable impact in enormous economies. No reason why AI will be any different.
It didn't take mobile apps with launch of the iPhone 20 years to add to the economy though, did it?
Why do I have a feeling that this will be ignored as biased by the people who need to read it the most.
It’s a grift being perpetuated by the folks at the top, who then sweep along in their slipstream folks under them, and so on. The folks who “need to hear this” are helpless to go against and so can’t back down, and the folks who don’t need to hear this because they’re driving it have their paychecks aligned to it, so they’re not backing down.
Why do you type like a bot?
Bottom line, no one's buying your vibeslop when they can create and maintain their own for their custom needs. And if we're not buying each others vibeslop there's no productivity to be measured in the economy.
With all this recent Claw stuff, it's weird that as people who should be championing the opposite due to our field of study or industry, some of us are now pushing a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
In my working environment, people get dressed down for repeatedly communicating incorrect information. If they do it repeatedly in an automated fashion they will be publically shamed if they are senior enough.
I have no idea what benefit a human-in-loop for sending an automatically generated emails or agent generated sdks or buliding blocks has when there is no guarentee or even a probability of correctness attached to the result. The effort for vaildating and editing a generated email can be equally or greater than manually writing a regular email let alone one of certain complexity or significance.
And what do we do to create to try to guarentee a semblance of correctness? We add another layer of automated validation performed by, you guessed it, the same crew of wacky fuzzy operators that can inject correct sounding gibberish or business workflows at any moment.
It's almost like trying to build a house of cards faster than the speed with which it is collapsing. There seems to be a morbid fascination among even the best of us with how far things can be taken until this way forward leads to some indisputable catastrophe.
> a method of automation that is akin to robo vaccums randomly tracking dogshit across the carpet.
Is it possible that this sort of problem will be fixed? Hypothetically, what would happen in a scenario where one of these apps can do in 1 hr the work that would take a developer a month, reliably? Or is your premise that will NEVER happen?
I think it’s still a bit too early to draw the conclusion.
We need to get past the hype first and let the cash grabbers crash.
After that, with a clear mind we can finally think about engineering this technology in a sane and useful way.
The most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength.
I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.
The US economy is remarkably resilient considering its withstood a year of sabotage from the top down.
I completely agree. If AI can't do 100% of a job then you can't remove the job.
And most jobs that can be automated already has been automated using traditional software.
You can replace it with a much lower paid employee though.
I think this is key:
"On top of that, there is currently no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth."
No doubt people are using it work ( https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-c... ) the question is how much productivity results and to whom does it accrue.
Partially this is AI capability (both today and in the past), partially this is people taking time to change their tools.
I'm sure we can find stories from the 1980s and 1990s about how the "world wide web" hasn't increased the GDP at all.
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