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?"

Comments

Cough

[caluml]

Cough

Re:Cough

[Shaper_pmp]

Indeed. I don't mean to trivilaise what may become a serious problem as society gets ever-more-complex at an ever-increasing rate, but this article basically boils down to:

1. Technology has now reached the point where it's increasing faster than I can keep up.
2. I now need technology to make up for deficiencies in my intellectual processes, as well as my work processes.

Happily, many kids today don't seem to have nearly as much problem as their parents/grandparents do with futureshock/infomation overload - having been raised in an age of rich media, near-ubiquitous networking and information-overload as a daily part of their lives, kids these days seem perfectly happy to keep up.

I don't see this as a huge problem for society, so much as for the older segment of it.

Of course, as development accelerates the age before which one can stay relevant is likely to drop, with interesting consequences - either we develop some kind of mental process-prosthesis to enable adults to continue interacting usefully with society, or we learn to live with the important decision makers of technology being pre-pubescent teens.

Re:Cough

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see this as a huge problem for society, so much as for the older segment of it.

Of course, as development accelerates the age before which one can stay relevant is likely to drop, with interesting consequences - either we develop some kind of mental process-prosthesis to enable adults to continue interacting usefully with society, or we learn to live with the important decision makers of technology being pre-pubescent teens.

What mindless babbling. In an age where we have to go to school longer and longer to acquire the skills for the technical and academic jobs, you honestly think that the ages are getting younger and younger?

Oh, wait, these kids grow up with computers. I forgot. What a technical wonder it is to run Windows. I often have to teach my kids how to do certain things on the computer that goes beyond surfing a web page. And these are teenagers.

But it's true - the older generation might be a little lost when it comes to myspace or whatever the next fad is.

BTWo, it's not a matter of "keeping up", it's a matter of ignoring/blocking more and more irrevelant information in your life. The signal to noise ratio is growing ever higher. I can spend time keeping up with the news, but 99% of that is a waste of time, especially since I'm not a politician. So it is with /., unless something truly revolutionary comes about, once in a blue moon.

Seriously, if I haven't read /. in the last 5 years - for all that not keeping up, I would have missed maybe a day's worth of reading that's truly relevant to my situation and applicable. Big whoop.

On the Other Hand

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[Digital Vomit]

Unfortunately I am now approaching stasis. 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.

Obviously Mr. Cochrane has never tried using Microsoft Vista.

Re:Obviously...

[name*censored*]

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.

So HE'S the one slowing us down? Well that's easy, we just get rid of him. Problem solved.

In all seriousness, the computers have only reached a point where the interfaces are now outdated in comparison to how much data it can simultaneously accept and act on (eg, i can click on an icon and it will be told both "click", and "open program" fast enough that I don't have to wait for it). Seems to me that it's just calling for the UIs to be upgraded - we could start using other body parts (cue jokes) such as eye focus for mouse pointer position (not my idea, another slashdot pundit). Or, as has been suggested in this topic, better voice commands, and audiable hotkeys (like that light-clapper thing, except it opens your web browser instead of turning the light on/off). Or we could have interfaces that have more complex meanings than only one ascii value - such as the internet keyboards with buttons for various programs, or with hotkeys speeding up productivity.

OR.. we could have interfaces that don't rely on physical movement, since even the fastest typist (keyboard) or gamer (mouse) are still much slower than their own brains. All the real life influences - the actual physics of arm momentum (don't go for the numpad too fast or you'll overshoot), appendage-anatomy limitations (RSI anyone?) and taking into account other obstacles (don't knock that coffee over!) slow them down. Perhaps we could have more intuitive machines, as the post suggests. Perhaps we could just have MORE task-queueing technology, which performs background tasks while waiting for user input (indexing the hard disk for searching, defragmenting, virus scanning, etc) so that the machine is ALWAYS waiting for user input, and we cut out that last little bit of having the user wait on the machine. Maybe we could enlarge UI areas, like the control centres in the matrix or minority report - it might be especially useful for coding (grab a variable/etc name or three from one place and a chunk of code from another window of related code) or graphics/design type work (grab colours, picture segments, morph shapes, you could assign a different line thickness to each finger! Perhaps body alterations - installing extra "memory" for multitasking, a telly in your tubby, a USB in your knee, bluetooth in your tooth or WIFI in your thigh..

Centuries-old saw

[gvc]

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?

Re:Centuries-old saw

[FooAtWFU]

Economists, since productivity determines how much stuff will get produced, which determines how much stuff per person there is, and that's pretty much a measure of the standard of living that will result ("real GDP per capita").

When you're talking about productivity in the entire economy, you can draw a graph - on the Y axis is "real GDP per capita" while on the X axis is "capital / labor" (K/L for short). If you add more capital (machines, computers, tools) people get more productive, but less so as you add more and more and more. This means the line you graph will start somewhat steep, but then level off as you get higher (not entirely unlike the graph of sqrt(x)). The rough guideline for the economy at present is the "rule of one third" - if you increase your capital stock by 100%, you'll get about 33% more output. This sort of rule determines how much capital we end up having - we will increase our capital stock with investment until we have reached the "target rate of return", which is actually a slope of this productivity curve. This is the point at which investment pays for itself.

Then there are wonderful things like increases in technology. These end up shifting the productivity curve upward: people can do more with their technology than they could before. This increases real GDP per capita directly, but it also means that for the same level of capital, we're below the target rate of return, and can invest in all sorts of new capital, which will pay for itself - so we increase our capital stock as well.

The good news is that technology keeps coming, and while it may not be quite the same Spectacular Breakthrough as the introduction of computers, there is plenty happening in a variety of industries. Take, for example, Wal*Mart (the company everyone loves to hate, yes...) They have achieved a substantial portion of their success by becoming more productive with managing their warehouses and inventories, and are actively looking to increase their productivity in this area. (In fact, I've seen studies that claim they were responsible for the bulk of retail productivity growth in the late 90's, directly or indirectly). "Supply chain management" is trendy. And perhaps some day we will see RFID tags at the check-out line (to replace the last great checkout productivity enhancer, bar codes).

Re:Wrong presupposition

[ThosLives]

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).

Why

[teflaime]

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.

Re:No man is an island

[pubjames]

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...

Re:No man is an island

[pubjames]

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.

If productivity per man-hour has increased ....

[srobert]

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.