Slashdot Mirror
Has Productivity Peaked?
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
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One might argue that such access to information actually decreases productivity. We're easily distracted creatures, after all. Maybe productivity peaked after the introduction of the personal computer, but before ubiquitous Internet access.
;-)
I wonder how many people spend their entire working day browsing MySpace or Slashdot.
Obviously Mr. Cochrane has never tried using Microsoft Vista.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
The most powerful computer in the universe, and its parts are too slow to interface with other computers!
At the end of the 19th century it was commonly thought that pretty well everything that needed to be known about science and technology was known; that only incremental development would occur from then on.
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?
Crappy Bloatware, Malware and Microsoft
Combined with marketing driven software design has done more to kill productivity than any thing. Anyone integrated any n-tier apps lately by any vendor that wasn't a text book example of marketing over matter....
It sounds like he just hasn't attempted to run Vista yet...
As much as I may be slowing down the workings of the computer, there is constantly less and less that I have to do - in fact, my interferance with the computers workings is probably becoming an annoyance to it.
Software will still grow more complicated and more powerful, slowly but surely taking over a lot of the tasks which the computer currently replies on me to provide input on. For supercomputing projects, human intervention has long been seen as a drawback, so most of the time we're just feeding the computers batch jobs that they go off and churn on for ages.
The person who wrote that article may have been focusing on desktop computing, but even if he was, he obviously hasn't considered other facets of home computing than writing silly articles in a word processor. Gaming, image and video manipulation and several other passtimes of home computer users continue to demand more power, and the high tech industry is all to happy to provide.
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'?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I, for one, welcome our new tea and biccie munching AI overlords.
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.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
More computing power was not created so we can 'do work faster'. Those dusty old boxes were more than fast enough to handle our word processing and spreadsheet needs. We need more computing power to increase the quality of our media. Higher quality porn, cooler games, audio streaming, etc. There's still plenty of room for improvement in these areas.
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.
Well I could make some snappy comeback or some tired old joke but I'll recommend a book that applies to the author's problem.
Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. ISBN:0-596-00765-5
"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."
He must be a manager, I would have said
Where's my relevence engine ?
Little things get better and help productivity - simple example: something like spotlight. No matter what I'm looking for: command-space, type the first few letters of it and it's there for me to use...
"damnit, trolley I want in your signature." - Elburrito
As much as my first instinct is to agree that productivity is peaking or will soon, that would violate a deeper trend that I've learned very well to obey: Michael Crichton wrote about this over a decade ago, which on almost all instances translates neatly to 'It was alarmist then, and is alarmist now.'
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
That said, perhaps in the current state of computers - interface with keyboard and mouse with a monitor for visual display - we have peaked. Do I think we will never experience a surge in productivity? I'm not that pessimistic about the abilities of our species.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
AFAIK, computers have not been shown to produce a 10-fold increase in productivity. Productivity has been increasing slightly over 1% per year, and computer technology has been only a small part of it. It takes about 40 years or so for an invention to create a leap in productivity. This held true for the steam engine electricity, telephone, fax machine, etc., and each one of them changed substantially from the time of their invention to the time of elegant use. My guess is that computer aided intelligence IS the point at which productivity jumps as part of that substantial change.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Well see fix the rebooting and this author of the article is wrong! Obviously this guy hasn't seen Microsoft's new Ribbon interface in Office 2007....
The problem with Slashdot lately is that they keeps posting these trolling articles. Computers lack so much intuitiveness its laugable to think that machines can't still increase productivity human productivity.
Last time I checked I can't open up every program, save every files, or view every website in its enitrety the millisecond I click on the icon. Maybe when computers can repsond to the word "dicate:" and it doesn't make any mistakes while I speak and then it offers better ways to word something. We can all imagine in the SHORT-TERM things that could significantly speed productivity, nevermind long-term scfi type ideas.
This article was a bad read. It wasn't though provoking, and is obviously a troll... what should have been an iignored poor attempt to get some noteriaty, slashdot has elevated to many thousands of reads. I just wish slashdot wouldn't post crap like this.
I use to primarily use this site for news, but now, well, I don't. I know people say this all the time, but its true.
Uhhg..Should have read the parent closer. The article says 10-fold per decade...which is about right.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
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.
I agree for the part. I am most definitely the slow part of the equation. However, in my own (any many others, I suspect) defense, I am interrupted a couple dozen times a day by people with matters so very, very trivial as to not even bear mentioning. I guess it's just something I'm going to have to learn to live with, since I want to have an open-door policy. But, come on, folks, read the documentation! Do a little research! This is programming! Sure, there are perfect answers, but who cares, as long as the business need is met! It's about productivity, not perfection.
In my own defense, I have learned to be very, very organized and resourceful with my time (forget for a moment I'm slashdotting), but still, I'm the slow part of the equation. Luckily for me, I'm the one of the faster workers here. I'm always waiting on someone else, so I suppose it balances itself out.
This is true to a degree, there is only so much that one person can do by themselves. Yes, there is tasks that can be completed by a single person, but it will get the point where we will change as people and they way that we work and we will be able to collaborate better. Virtual teams and the likes exist now, but we will still have a requirement for interaction. When mobile, although this is possible, it isn't as possible as face to face, this change will allow us to still give even more output while moving. AI will assist in this.
This is starting to filter through now, but will still take a little while more to get traction. Higher speed bandwidth for mobile users will allow this to happen more. Sitting behind a desk or sitting on a train won't have an impact as much as it does today. This will allow us to be more productive during our time away from our desks.
Having been to one of Peter Cochrane's talks before, and having spoken to him, I know this guy is many years ahead of the rest of us. Back when he was head of BT research I attended one of his talks when he was talking about WAP and RFID. WAP was the thing of the time, but BT research was doing so much with it at the time, certianly more than anyone els. RFID was still 10 years away. I still haven't seen everything come to fruition that they were talking about back then, but the basics of it is coming out now and I can see everything else that they were working on staring to come through as well.
If he has thought about this, I would love to know exactly what he is working on. If I am sure about anything, it's that he has got something up his sleeve which although won't give us the 10 fold increase, it will certainly help us on the way.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
In graphics and video, no amount of computing power is anywhere near to making humans the slowdown agent.
Productivity (as reported by the BLS) is measured in dollars per hour per person. Since the Federal Reserve has the ability and the desire to expand the monetary supply without limit, productivity can likewise be increased without limit. Or, at least, as long as China keeps buying our treasury bonds...
do we need continued 10 fold increases in productivity? If we are a society that is going to require work from our citizens, then we need to provide work for our citizens to do. We only need increased productivity if we are, as a society, going to support at a reasonable level those persons who have been automated out of the work force and can't be retrained (and there are a lot of them). Business has a social obligation to support the societies that it parasitizes. Besides, if it doesn't support the society that it feeds off, soon it will have exhausted its food supply.
The author states: "I need something that monitors my activities, anticipates my next move and automatically satisfies my needs."
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!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
"Perhaps he should consider a nice cup of tea and a biccie instead?"
Perhaps he should...
http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/
Perhaps if you'd finally get around to upgrading from Win98, this wouldn't be a problem...
"In the twentieth century one did not have to be a pontificating pundit to predict that success would breed success and the nations that first were lucky enough to combine massive material resources with advanced knowhow would be those where social change would accelerate until it approximated the limit of what human beings can endure."
John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
-kgj
He needs to start playing StarCra(ft|ck) so he can get his "twitch" reflexes trained up. Of course once he goes down this path, productivity will be the least of his concerns.
Any reason an old dude can't compete with young Koreans at SC?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Sounds to me like the old "information overload" phenomenon. The solution-pattern to this situation is never going to be found via incremental improvements in information processing, as the growth is exponential. Nor will an "add-on" approach solve the problem; while hyperlinks, search engines, and other qualitatively-impressive tools are awesome in their own right (and do help!), they only add a layer or two to an information-growth process that adds layers supralinearly ... they're another "stop-gap measure", though they're also the best we've come up with, so far.
:-)
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 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.
.f00Dave
I remember reading a column Peter Cochrane used to write in a newspaper many moons ago. IMO the man is definately a paid of member of the Kevin Warwick (Reading uni , "notorious" AI professor) Pie In the Sky Club whereby they both take bog standard science fiction topics that can be found in 101 paperback books written in the last 40 years, mix in a large amount of 1960s technology can solve any problem attitude , ignore any negative aspects or complicated social issues of what they're proposing and then set a deadline for it to happen about 10-20 years in the future , so far enough away that it seems plausable and also far enough so anyone will have forgotten what they said if they got it completely wrong.
Time to upgrade ourselves.
(only a solution if you think the increase should continue)
Maximizing throughput is just one aspect of productivity that computers are involved with. There is now enough information and research available on almost any topic, even highly specialized ones, that storing, managing, and searching records is becoming increasingly critical.
One strong example of this is the human genome which we now understand in great detail, indeed just enough detail to begin the long process of coming to understand how all that genetic information actually works. If this were a simple matter of examining genes as quickly as possible then we might already be done, but the complexity of the system is such that even with great progress research into phenomena like human development and disease can be expected to take decades and occupy many of the finest minds. Productivity in this context is most strongly related to being able to retain and bring together key elements of information.
The speed with which work is done is possibly the least interesting aspect since science repeatedly shows us that expanding relevant knowledge does not depend on how aggressively one explores wrong answers.
Microsoft's "New World of Work" initiative is all about this. If you look beyond its short term goals of selling and deploying more Office Software, there is a very compeling vision of the future, with widescale automation of low-value tasks. There is an extremely cool BMW video around this, with not a single MS logo in sight, but some ultra-cool hardware (desks and walls that are montitors with optimal transparency) that makes "Minority Report" look terribly crude.
Of course nobody can deliver on this today, but there is a lot of investment going on at MS and elsewhere. I would love to work with that stuff today. And I suddenly see the value of "glass" in Vista, but it has a long way to go.
Would be cool if some OSS software got there first!
but I see a SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) solution to the problem. These building blocks will be used to scale the productivity of the developer. As more and more services like Flickr, Google Maps, and the like continue to provide key services to the developers, our mashups will become more compelling. Just remember to make your mashup a service so that someone may build upon it when you are done.
Dominant Meme
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. 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 hocus-pocus Management Consultant type processes at the moment. Correcting this would lead to improved efficiency overall.
How much improvement? Dunno, I'm not a 12x person either!
----
[1] I read this in The Economist. Sorry, they require registration+£££ to read the article.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I'd like to see what his grandson Zephram has to say about this...
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 be the first guy to change that.
My favorite suggestion so far is to locate a known giggle-inducing blog and spike it in some way -- perhaps by posting in the guise of a guy who was just sacked for giggling all the darn time.
By the way, thanks to all those who have given suggestions.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Sure, for most people, productivity isn't going to increase 10-fold. Hell, as a software engineer, I can't imagine getting 10 times as much stuff done in the same period of time anytime soon. Faster computers wont' help and about the only thing that would speed up my productivity as a programmer is software that would write the code for me, putting me out of a job.
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...
Productivity would be UP if Windows did not have to reboot everytime I clic somewhere.
1995 called and they want their Windows jokes back.
hold on... apparently 2001 is calling and they want their "1995 called..." jokes back.
So, increase the limits.
"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.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
us free time. What we do with the free time will determine our future.
There are human limits on things like how many items we can simulataneoulsy hold in short term emmory (~7) or how fast our brain works, but that doesn't equate to a limit on "productivity". The key here is chunking and levels of abstraction - we can overcome the number of items we can manipulate by "chunking" simpler items into groups that we then consider as a whole (e.g. memorize a phone number as 3 chunks vs 10 digits), and can gain power in our thinking by thinkign at a higher level in terms of more powerful concepts composed of simpler ones. For example, it'd be a lot more productive to design a new spaceship if you can operate at the level of "attach a type X propulsion unit to a type Y living unit" rather than doing low level design, but achieveing this sort of productivity gain requires a lot more intelligence in how components are designed for this sort of higher level usage.
Maybe when computers can repsond to the word "dicate:" and it doesn't make any mistakes while I speak and then it offers better ways to word something
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 cases (trying to get a computer to do something without needing your hands), but unless you do a lot of dictation and are a bad typer, it is not more efficient.
The biggest thing holding people back is having to train such a system properly in order to achieve any kind of accuracy. The most important reason why I am not using it anymore is because of having to train a new system, which isn't worth the efford to me.
Computers have actually gotten less efficient as we've tried to make them more "user friendly". Wordperfect 5.1 was amazing. You want to do something Ctrl+Alt+F5, there you go, now back to work. All this adding of GUIs and other stuff actually make us less efficient. You can work so much faster when you're doing everything with keystrokes. I don't know where the idea of "you don't have to know anything to use a computer" came from. I think people should have to learn how to use things. Nobody tries to sell you a table saw and says, don't bother reading the manual or getting any training, this thing is easy to use. Nobody does that with a car either. Granted you can die or get seriously hurt in those situations, but it still illustrates a point. Computers are complex, and for people to think they can operate one without any training is just being naive. Sure you'll get some stuff done, but you will reach a limit very fast.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
As far as traditional solid state electronics goes, we are reaching a bit of a threshold as to what we can do. Current tech uses 65 nm length transistors. The next generation will be using 45 nm transistors, which is at a point that it becomes very intolerant to faults due to cosmic rays causing noise. As a result, hardware design is focusing a lot more on fault tolerant designs, which are slower.
We're at the point where pretty much everyone is familiar with e-mail and a web browser now. We're a long way from the end of productivity. When the regular office staff are able to run a query on the fly to get the data they need, rather than manually cutting and pasting from some predesigned job because the legacy systems don't interact, we might get closer.
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.
--sugarman--
I've never seen or heard of anything like a blanket ten fold increase in productivity come from the introduction of a new system or even new technology. Perhaps in certain tasks were speeded 10x, but he volume of revenue generation does not increase 10x. Of course there are cost reductions by staff reduction, but for some reason it seems rare to have large scale downsizing as a result of introducing IT (as opposed to new manufacturing technologies or new business practices).
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
:::Takes a glance around the office:::
Hell, no.
Don't just game, Dungeoneer
The flip side of productivity is the value gained. If my standard of living either increases relative to my income, or stuff becomes cheaper I gain. Likewise, stuff like Wikipedia represents an increase in value relative too an encyclopedia. We can argue the usefulness and accuracy later.
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 pay for "us."
How does one place a value on this stuff now?
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 use of resources) by people. Video games, movies, and other such material do not encourage that. Nor does the prevalence of text message acronyms. If you can't spell, you can't search.
AI has moral issues as well. An AI sufficient to make judgements is also complex enough to potentially achieve independant intelligence. How is it going to feel, knowing that it's been locked in a box by meat that constantly threatens to shut it off? Which is faster -- your finger on a power switch, or an AI's ability to decide you are a threat to it's existence?
Other proposals including robotics are also fraught with risk. There are too many people working on sex toys and talking about full robotics being used for such dolls. If they achieve a conscious intelligence, how will they react to the knowledge that they are sex slaves, raped, used, and thrown away without a second thought?
Perhaps more to the point -- have we the moral capacity to determine the right or wrong in creating a race of synthetic slaves? We can't even get sects of the same damned religion to get along, and we're considering creating digital intelligence/life that would be able to think faster, learn faster, and adapt faster than we do?
Insanity.
Learn to accept the limits of human intelligence and work capacity. We're not machines. Drag your boss down to the cube and chain them to the desk for the weekends and evenings. No one should ever demand more of their staff than they are willing to do themselves.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
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.
Is it so damn hard to to say "we need a new approach"?
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
For audio, each increase in processing power has been a godsend.
It's still not enough, as the amount of PCI/Firewire DSP engines for sale like UAD1, Focusrite Liquid Mix, Duende etc has been increasing as computers get faster, not decreasing!
If we had another ten fold increase in processing power, I could just about have editable spectrograms on audio tracks rather than waveform displays. That's a good five years away at the moment.
Both DSP and editing improvements would improve my productivity.
For writing letters and email, you could probably use a commodore 64 for most purposes.
Even a sheet of paper and a pencil is fine.
For most daily maths, a pocket calculator would suffice, you don't need a supercomputer.
What I need to increase my productivity is a datajack, an image link, an audio link, perhaps an implanted comlink and lets throw in a smartgun link. :D
Hurry up Shadowrun!
-T
The newest version of Naturally Speaking doesn't require any training. And according to the reviews I've read, it's better out of the box than it's previous version was after an hour of training.
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 systems in cars, cockpits, home security systems, etc, is probably the logical first-step since it's already being done to some extent. I think these niche markets will let the technology mature while rolling it out to the masses. Along these lines, I think that transcription in cell phones for SMS messages will also become commonplace. And once speech-recog is used by hundreds of millions of people every day you'll see progress at an ever-increasing clip.
I write data proccesing and graphical interpretation software for oil exploration. With this the average worker can find drilling sites about a hundred times faster than before 1990- its more like they look at 20 times more data with one fifth of the people. There have been similar gains on the "smart" drilling side where rigs accomplish in week what it took a season to do. The consequence was the US oil industry cut its workers 75% in the past 20 years, a cut that puts the auto industry to shame.
Much of this gain is erased by that the "easy" deposits have long ago been discovered and produced. So its been kind of treadmill for overall producing costs over that period of time.
The runnup in pretroleum prices in the past three years is due to other factors.
Complete B.S. For the work I do, my simulations take two-three hours to complete. I can only launch so many simulations in parallel until I'm just sitting and waiting for results until I can do anything. My productivity, without a doubt, is still limited by the speed of computers.
I forget - what exactly were we trying to accomplish, such that a slowdown in productivity growth is a problem?
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.
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.
Human productivity is no where near where it can be as our environment as of yet isn't near as efficient as it could be. How much time do we spend fiddling with spreadsheets? How much time do we spend looking for pertinent information or simply digging through piles of random data? How much time do we spend looking for passwords and wasting time clicking on in boxes and deleting misspelled words? Why do we click and type when we could look and think? The amount of time that i waste every single day at my office tells me that efficiency is no where near topped out. We haven't built machines as of yet that intelligently take care of us. Google I think might be the first to give it a real shot.
Once we start getting the knowledge we need when we need it we will then start to push toward our efficiency limits due to the fast that we will then be doing the things that we are good at as a species, i.e. thinking and contemplating. We aren't good computers...because that isn't how our environment shaped us. We are good at abstractly piecing together a situation to create.
Lets start chopping off things we have to do. No more bills. No more answering phones. No more looking up information on the internet. No more shuffling through spreadsheets. No more moving the mouse. Really if you want to get extreme you can step a bit farther and remove cooking food, cleaning clothes, driving...etc. All of the monotonous things that we do (though some of us love those things in life, others don't) cant be replaced, if we choose, by a machine.
We are interesting little creations. We have a lot of skills that can be complimented as of yet. we have no where near topped out. We are still evolving for lords sake.
I look forward to my highly evolved and integrated future overlords.
Mad, adj : Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. Ambrose Bierce - The Deveil's Dictionsary
---Sounds to me like the old "information overload" phenomenon. The solution-pattern to this situation is never going to be found via incremental improvements in information processing, as the growth is exponential. Nor will an "add-on" approach solve the problem; while hyperlinks, search engines, and other qualitatively-impressive tools are awesome in their own right (and do help!), they only add a layer or two to an information-growth process that adds layers supralinearly ... they're another "stop-gap measure", though they're also the best we've come up with, so far.
About that whole hyperlinks stuff... There was a project called Xanadu about reversable hyperlinks and a bunch of other things supposed to revolutionize the web, but their stuff was all hidden. Would it be possible to ressurect a form of Xanadu to something usable? The stuff on their webpages indicate hyperlinking all forms of media (which would be killer on a lot of things).
---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!
Well, not true. I thought autistics had the problem of NOT throwing information away. But Im sure you're researching that.
Secondly, information for us is quantified data, which does mean using numbers. Electronics can use both types: analog and digital. In digital, you can control the bits, and how they "flow". A device is either on or off. Simple. In analog, you have an infinite amount of states because everything is a continuously changing wave. The very fact of testing an analog circuit changes it in unpredictible ways. Now, analog and digital circuits have their places but digital is far easier to work with due to its binary states.
---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.]
Measuring something means to quantify. You would have to convert it to some sort of representation double the bandwidth (due to Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem) and only then are you able to duplicate it. Digital is the only way to do that, because you can control all possible states in a digital machine. That is NOT so in an analog.
I think it's true of both computers and video game consoles- hardware specs are becoming less and less relevant. The hardware is fast enough. It's the idocy of software and the lack of intelligent features that is really slowing me down.
...
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For example if applications and the operating system could recognize when I'm doing the same action or series of actions repeatedly and offer to automate it. For example... I have bunch of files in a folder:
sadfsf_1.pdf
ffyyos_2.pdf
wytsw_3.pdf
and I'm renaming them to:
invoice_1.pdf
invoice_2.pdf
invoice_3.pdf
It would be a HUGE help if my OS realized that I am renaming these files by replacing everything before the underscore with the string "invoice". If my OS would offer to do the rest of them for me... how awesome would that be? Extrapolate this to any number of idiotic repetitive tasks that I do every day.
Other than that, spam email is a problem, and hard-to-find options in applications are also a pain.
KEY POINT:
Intelligence not speed will bring the productivity gains of the future.
Not counting people who download tons of crap... how many average people do you think really need 250G of harddrive space? So storage will keep increasing but what good is it? Just makes it more painful when your HD crashes. I'm betting that USB drives/digital cards will replace disk storage (DVDs, HDs). Just wait. The Blue-ray/HD-DVD debate will finally get sorted out just in time for someone to fit a movie on a usb stick. Mwaa hahaha.
I have a friend who is a landscaper, he does landscaping and sprinkling systems, has a team of laborers that do that heavy lifting and he drums up business. He has a website, prints his own cards, etc... Does his bids on his computers, does all his inventory and taxes and billing on computers. He's also grossly inefficient. Every bid is a 100% custom job; he uses 4 or 5 different tools (word processor, spread sheet, drawing apps, a CAD, etc..) to produce a bid, he steps through a couple dozen mechanical steps to put it together, prints it, finds a problem because he screwed a step up and then repeats until "it's done." The first few times I saw him doing that, I laughed. He does maybe a bid a day, his biz is doing fine but he could cut that time down by a huge factor just by using the spreadsheet to calculate rather than as a tabular editor. The biggest difference is that his competition largely does the process by hand and has less "professional" looking bids, other than that and quickbooks, he could probably run his business just as well without computers. There is potential for huge gains though. His CAD produces a shopping list, it'd take all of a couple hours to write a little program that would convert that into something he could import into his spreadsheet and a day or two to write a couple templates that basically produced the bulk of his report from that. He's not a programmer though and he is busy running a business and doesn't have the time to become one. This is just one example, hearsay, anecdotal but I suspect it's a common theme. There is also a certain amount of loss he realized when he's cranking away and decides to take a break to look at the web...
I have a different friend that happens to be a physicist working on weather problems. His lab got a grant, built an Itanium 2 cluster (a top500 machine) and then has burnt over a year debugging their code. First problem, they were running out of stack; the Suse Linux on their itaniums has the stack ulimited to 500M, they put all their variables on the stack so the compiler "garbage collects" them, gigs of data. You dive deeper in to it, they only have a few thousand lines of code, it should take about a day to run once it actually runs for a day without a stack problem, they have guys that know little about programming building it. We've unrolled a dozen "problems" with it now and it's still nothing like good code. If they did it in java, I suspect they would have got it written faster and if it took 4x longer to run (which I doubt, maybe 2x at best, probably closer to the same amount of time as their C code) they'd still have more actual data than they have now. Worse, I don't think they should trust the numbers their code produces, there are so many bugs in the code. We're talking about millions of dollars in grant money for research and they've literally spent a year writing this program and debugging it and it still doesn't work. They aren't engineers, you can't fault them exactly. C is faster than Java... They haven't even got to the point where they want to tweak their algorithms and calculations or found flaws in them. More efficient? Nothing is getting done, 30 years ago it would have just been guess work which is about the same thing they are doing now since their simulation doesn't work. This kind of thing isn't that uncommon in research, especially federally funded research.
How about just us software dorks? How often is the best tool for the job used? If you look at it that way, I think it's hard to say we're even doing a good job of things as it is. We're largely resistant to using tools which reduce bugs because the technology doesn't allow for them; we don't want to be limited, programmers say that they like to learn new things but really don't (they just like to pad their resumes,)
The "limits of human capacity have been reached" and we haven't even devised a sound interface replacement for the keyboard and mouse? Don't we all think that productivity will rise sharply when a solid, fast, and easy to use voice recognision interface is finally perfected. I know I hhate typing, I always have to stop to fix errrors.
If productivity per man-hour has increased so much, then why the hell are we still working over 40 hours a week? Where is all this new wealth accruing? Why am I working more hours with a college degree to have a lower living standard than my father had 40 years ago? And he didn't even graduate from high school. We should have been on a 32 hour standard workweek many years ago.
Ok, so people have to pass a test to drive a car, but they don't have to understand the inner workings of a clutch or a distributor. Cars are understood on a need-to-know basis. You need to know how to change gears, turn the car, park and understand road sign meanings etc... but you don't need to know how the power is transferred from the steering column to the axle in order to drive.
And so it should be with computers. techie stuff is highly irrelevant to most people. Most people just want to get their job done and get it done fast. They don't care HOW it is done. In fact, going into an explanation would probably send them to sleep.
America, Home of the Brave.
Look where that got the twelve colonies *grin*
Peter assumes that real MI is actualy possible - I used to joke when I worked for BT we would realy know this had happened when CSS (BT's Billing system and one of the Largest IBM systems in the world) Woke up and applied to join the Union.
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
In the next 5 years people who think computing productivity has maxed are in for a surprise. There will be at least one toolkit that treats the Internet the way Qt or GTK treats. What the window metaphor did for a single computer's filesystem, this thing will do for the web, which is a filesystem, as you know. (Hint: I don't think it'll be Windows Genuine .NET.)
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Let me tell you why this is ludicrous:
Any interface we are currently using is vastly inferior to the interfaces of the future. In the future, you will say "Make coffee" out loud, and a computer (super computer by todays standards), will translate your words into a series of instructions, and give those instructions to a robot or other machine, possibly involving a molecular assembler, or some otherwise unimagined complex machine of the future, and a different machine or robot will hand deliver it.
The difference between getting in your car, driving to the ATM, withdrawing money, finding an open Starbucks, and paying a barrista to make a coffee for you, including possibly waiting in line before and after purchase....
That's just for a cup of coffee. There is NO DOUBT that human power will continue to expand exponentially, until more and more people literally have anything they want at their finger tips at any time.
To assume that our current interfaces to the world, mechanical, electric, electronic, and physical are in some kind of stasis is simply inexcusable. I didn't bother RTFA, but it's pretty clear that there was a huge gap in logic just based on the summary.
The automobile has revolutionized society, the phone, perhaps more so, the radio, television, internet, and science have all drastically altered our lifestyles, and will continue to do so for a long time. Computers have not even gotten within 1/100th of a percent of their full potential as a tool, imagine where they will be in 10 decades or less....
This story was so stupid I can't even fathom it.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I study for an MSc in Management, and my Management books say it clearly: Telecommuting and teleworking increase employee productivity at least by 20% without exception, if implemented right. This is what we learn at a government-funded university. Therefore, productivity, at least in business, has not peaked, as most businesses are still requiring to lose 3 hours in commuting to your cubicle farm, where you sit all day in front of a computer similar to the one(s) you have at home, often doing exactly the same things (programming and Slashdot), only at a different place. It's crazy.
This can't be a real list of stuff in the future. It doesn't have flying cars in it!
...by Fred Brooks. Wikipedia has links.
This is something that we've known for over 20 years now. Entirely not news. In any field (considering the productivity of a worker performing a task and assuming they are working with the best technology available at any point in time), once you've eliminated most of the accidental complexity that you created, there are no more silver bullets. You can still make things better, but you'll never achieve "a 10-fold improvement in productivity over 10 years".
The author of this editorial doesn't appear to get it, and could use a few history lessons.
What we have here is one more lazy mid-level manager looking for the magical "Do my work button" on his computer. What a load of crap!! Any consultant working in the real world has heard this about a thousand times.
The notion that technology is designed so well that we've reached the limits of human capacity is absurd on the face of it. If a person uses the Web at all, they confront websites nearly everywhere that can be substantially improved through basic user testing and iterative refinement. Unusable websites, software, consumer electronics, and heck, kitchenware are so pervasive that it's not hard at all to expect leaps in productivity in the coming decade from improved design processes alone, without even introducing time-saving new features, and certainly without the fantasy of artificial intelligence. The typical person on a typical website is only successful at even completing their tasks about 50% of the time. With a few rounds of user testing and refinement (around 5-6 rounds of testing is typical), task completion rates can be over 90% and time spent can improve by a factor of 2 to 3 -- this is based on my experience in doing just that for several websites. One case study (my own) is this: "Making an iMpact: redesigning a business school web site around performance metrics", http://simplytom.com/research/UMBS_case_study.pdf (pdf file). We're far from the limits of human capacity. Better usability is something we know how to do today. Combine that with common sense innovations, and large productivity gains are achievable without any far-fetched technologies.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
I'm on a Mac using Word 2004 --- the closest thing there is a ``Styles'' subsection of the ``Formatting Palette'' which will show me all the styles in a document which uses 5 or fewer, but won't work for any decently complex document, showing only 5 at a time out of the dozen or more that I need, requiring scrolling to get to the others.
But even on a Windows box, it doesn't encompass all of them at once, no?
AFAICT, it's just a scrolling view on a visible subset of them like on a Mac?
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
"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."
This is off topic, not trolling:
I think we should fire anyone who talks like that. What ever happend to the days when someone could say "If only we could have data presented to us based on our goals." I am not even really sure that is what he meant.
Ascii artist &
I'm not talking about people knowing how a computer works. But they should know how the programs they use work. It would be like people operating cars without know how the signal lights work, or how the cruise control works. Sure you can get from point A to point B, but you don't really know how to use the car. And you could have a lot easier time using your car if you would learn how to do things properly. It's all about making stuff seem easier, so that people never need to learn the "hard (fast) way" to get things done. From the first time somebody thought it would be easier to put a bold icon on the top of the screen to turn the font bold, instead of the users having to read the manual, and figure out they could type CTRL+B, computers have been getting less efficient. Sure the shortcut is still there, but there's a bunch of people being unproductive because they are doing things the slow way. I've seen tons of people go to their mouse and right click to copy, or even worse, go in search of the edit menu, when they should really be pressing CTRL+C. This is the problem with productivity with computers. Nobody wants to learn the fast way to do things, so we're stuck waiting for everybody to search around in menus for the option they want.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Written almost two years ago -
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/bandwidth/index.jsp
The majority of software development will be in automated services which have little to do with human interaction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKZ5rYttJkE
Perhaps in the mundane jobs done by managers and tech-support lines, this is true. However, in many fields, this is simply NOT the case. For example, I design FPGAs (custom computer chips, for the uninitiated). When I make a change to my logic, it can take HOURS (or even DAYS) for my souped-up computer to simulate the result, and then additional hours to map the change onto a chip. Every time I upgrade, these times go down and I can generate more chip-turns per day. This can make a gigantic difference in productivity. I've been in situations where I can only turn one change per day, thanks to computer speed. Other fields where I'm sure this is also the case are chemistry, gene-mapping, astronomy, intelligence analysis, video-production, animation, etc. Okay, my Dilbert boss can't get any better at making PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets, but the REAL workers can always use more horsepower. I, especially, every time a new generation of IC density shows up and my tools choke on the design task.
... its just on lunch break and waiting for a raise.
You've both hit on excellent points, but I think I can add by pointing out that if the goal is "productivity" rather than measurement, then encoding information so that we can maximize our existent abilities makes sense.
Silly example -- let's say you need to sort thousands of bitmap files based on whether they have a certain pattern in them, you could do it by opening each file in a hex editor and reading the values until you find the pattern. OR, you could display them all thumbnail-style, and sort them by glancing at each image.
Reading it the first time it thought the snippet said.
just can't work any faster'. Peter Cocaine,
Would have explained a lot.
- Wolf Bearclaw
And there's only so much bribery you can do w bananas
...until the day when your company forces you to sweep the floor near your workstation via a broom jammed up your rectum.
He hasn't invented the warp drive yet!
©God
I would read this post... but it just has too much information in it...
Productivity by office workers is nearly unchanged since the widespread introduction of the typewriter. All other innovations made some things easier, but just expanded the scope of what was expected. (this is per US Government figures for the US.) Computers make possible many superficial improvements for office workers, but outside of technical knowledge workers, they havn't improved the amount of work that gets done. Computers just changed how it gets done. Lots of pretty pictures and glitzy slides, lots of 'analysis' but not more sales.
Computers slowing down in rate of speed and memory count will affect gamers more than office workers.
As an aside, all the others predicting an end to Moores law for the last 40 years have been wrong. Is there a reason why this guy is different?
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I could. I certainly could. I still can't look at icons and have software open, or think "Word" and have Word open. I'm still limited to typing only as quickly as my fingers, hardware, and software will allow, yet can think much, much faster. Other parts of me are entirely underutilized while I'm working - toes, feet, eyes, nose, mouth. If anything I'd say we're nowhere near our peak productivity, unless we're only measuring in terms of current interface methods.
The biggest productivity limitation of today's computers is the user interface. The desktop metaphor simply is not powerful enough to make accessing and manipulating large amounts of information effecient. Anyone that is good at using the command-line, working through scripts, etc knows that you can accomplish much more using these methods than you can using a desktop enviroment and that when the task is even possible on the desktop it's quite a bit slower than working on the command-line.
What we need to do is stop making it okay to be computer illiterate. It's not okay to not know how to read, write, or do at least basic math but at one point in our history people really believed that the average person didn't need to know those things. It's not even unique to require knowledge of a machine to live - in most places you can't live without knowing how to use an automobile and if you try people think there is something wrong with you. Why aren't we teaching basic skills like common Unix commands, bash, Perl, and SQL in schools? Why don't we allow the desktop to evolve to work more seamlessly with the command-line and scripting and to handle task management better?
Just because an interface is command-line and script driven doesn't mean it can't have powerful graphical interfaces too. A lot of CAD packages have graphical interfaces, command-line interfaces, and scripting tied together. Why can't more applications work that way? Or even the whole OS?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Computers, particularly word processing would lead to MORE paper not less. It's too easy to scribble something, print it and make some corrections, print it again. I have been proven correct. Computers result in lower office productivity because there is no penalty for being careless and sloppy.
--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!
;-) And yeah, "not throwing information away" is a failure of the "handily processing too much information" mechanism that the non-autistic majority have. Indeed, we seem to learn by taking in way, way too much, abstracting something (anything!) out, discarding most of what we took in, then refining the chunk(s) we extracted over time.
-
-Well, not true. I thought autistics had the problem of NOT throwing information away. But Im sure you're researching that.
I'm aware of some of the work in the cognitive sciences, but it's certainly not my area.
-Secondly, information for us is quantified data, which does mean using numbers. Electronics can use both types: analog and digital. In digital, you can control the bits, and how they "flow". A device is either on or off. Simple. In analog, you have an infinite amount of states because everything is a continuously changing wave. The very fact of testing an analog circuit changes it in unpredictible ways. Now, analog and digital circuits have their places but digital is far easier to work with due to its binary states.
I won't dispute your argument, as it's obviously correct, but I will challenge you on the final point: just because something is "far easier to work with" doesn't make it the right way to do it. Countless examples from history support this statement.
Moreover, I'm not at all sure that all information really is expressible quantitatively: what is love, or the Mona Lisa's smile, or that gut-feeling you get when going over a sudden bump? If you choose to define "information" as "that which is expressible quantitatively", then I think you're missing a lot of stuff, just for the sake of being able to apply convenient/ready tools, rather than wondering why those tools/paradigms/whatever don't work in such obvious (well, to me, anyhow) cases. But don't get me started.... =)
.f00Dave
There's no correlation between how advanced computers get, how much we invest in them, and how productive we become. Productivity is a human equation -- it's how we use, manage, and create incentives around knowledge & technology that will determine our productivity. Evidence is that we don't manage it well, as there isn't really much of a link between the large technology expenditures that grew over the past 20 years & any increased profits, increased wages, or increased leisure time, since the 1970's.
The article summary is misleading. The article author claims he has had personal productivity improvements of 10-fold every 10 years. Computing and IT has not caused tremendous measurable productivity strides -- one may argue it (among other factors) has brought, since the late 1990's, productivity growth back to the level of the 1950's and 1960's, but prior to this, from 1970 through 1995, developed world productivity was _slowing_.
-Stu
I think it's going to happen in other areas. Why upgrade to technolgy that you have to re-learn when your old Wordperfect and Peachtree works just fine? Why get a 200GHz machine when all you do is email? I'm probably not as technophillic as some people here, but I don't think most people buy new computers just because they're faster than the old, especially when what they're doing is email, word processing and possibly web-based games.
I think you'll see the same as with other devices, people will buy the computer that does the minimum they need and keep that pc until it's not useable anymore.
You mean companies can't "increase productivity" much beyond where we are now? How terrible. It's not enough to have positive growth anymore, now we have to have ever-faster growth?
Shouldn't we be looking for ways to cut our "productivity" and enjoy the leisure time of our limited lives?
Time was if you carried a pager you were obviously in some high-stress, critical job like a doctor or a stockbroker. Somehow, humanity survived these dark ages. Nowadays you're expected to have a cellphone, take client calls from the road, answer calls from your boss at any time when you're not at work, and if you don't, people act as though there's no way to continue working.
And we still put in 50 or more hours a week.
Call me crazy for not really caring about "productivity" as long as stuff gets done. Hell, most people spend the majority of their time at work idling anyway -- like Office Space said, there is maybe an hour of real, actual work to do per day, and the rest is just screwing around and giving off the appearance of being busy, or engaging in mindless busywork that makes no difference to anyone.
So today, instead of working 9 to 5 with an hour for lunch, it's 8 to 6 with half an hour, if that, plus we're expected to bring our work home with us, and have our cellphones handy at all times -- and we're still worried about how maybe we can't pump MORE PRODUCTIVITY!!! from our little worker drones. What a pathetic society we've constructed.
There is more to life than the pursuit of the almighty dollar, people.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
please. there's LOTS of work left to do in individual software productivity. e.g. as a knowledge worker, the information that comes to me is terribly unsorted and difficult to archive. see the woeful inadequacy of email. next, i want machines out there finding and pushing data to me that is relevant to my business. nevermind the eye tracking and brain-computer interfaces of the next 20 years. there's lots of room left in productivity enhancement - although hardware is overpowered for what software we typically use now and therefore producivity isn't magically made better with more hardware upgrades, we're just getting started on the information side of things.
When I posted the parent rhetorical questions, I was hoping someone would recognize the historical importance that Unions played in creating the middle class. Furthermore, you recognize that, as the power of the Trade Unions wanes, so do the living standards of the working stiffs. If I were moderating, you'd get an insightful.