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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.
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?
It sounds like he just hasn't attempted to run Vista yet...
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!
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.
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
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).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
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 if you'd finally get around to upgrading from Win98, this wouldn't be a problem...
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.
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...
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
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
I'd like to see what his grandson Zephram has to say about this...
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...
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.
How small a company? 5-10 people, or perhaps a hundred?
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.
I am John Hurt.
From this article on the BBC website:
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.
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.
Consider over farming. Using artificial means to contunire growing food
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 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 population of that country)).
In other words, a very dramatic increase of productivity is quite possible in agriculture, and happens where there is a real need or motive for it. I somehow doubt also that this is the end of such development.
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".
"Much of our Sci-Fi has come true because WE aimed for it. Star Trek Comms anybody? They're called cell phones now."
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 supercomputers of the mid 80s would still easy blow a current desktop PC into the weeds, plus the fact that given a current desktop runs at 3Ghz and computers then were (for the sake of argument) 3Mhz , you'd only need 1000 of them to equal a current desktop. Ok , chips now carry out more instructions per clock cycle than then so say you'd need 10,000 of the old CPUs. Still hardly a whole world of machines.
"we dont have that long to wait."
Given that no one really knows how the human brain carries out its information processing and the current woeful state of AI I'd suggest that true human like Ai is decades and decades away. Don't confuse processing power with intelligence - they're not the same thing. Its like saying that with ever more powerful engines that one day a car will fly. It won't , not unless you give it wings.
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.
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.
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.
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.