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?"
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.
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?
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)
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.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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.