Intuitively I think what's happening is we got that productivity bump around 2000 when most jobs incorporated computers, but we haven't figured out how to actually make people better.<p>Computers have made it easier to compose and share and read writing, but it's still just as hard as it ever was to go from brain to keyboard and from screen to brain. Computers haven't done anything to reduce the mental effort of understanding what other people are thinking.<p>So what's happening is we're using computers to help with all the non-thinking stuff. We got a bump when we grabbed the low hanging fruit (spreadsheets, networks, email), but we're seeing diminishing returns on everything else (chat, entertainment, portability). Computers helped to increase productivity when they replaced manual labor, like how electronic spreadsheets replaced literal giant sheets of graph paper marked up with pencil and eraser by people wearing long rubber gloves. They don't increase productivity when they warn us about a pothole in the road ahead.<p>Everything that people added to the world was the result of thinking and computers have only gone so far towards helping with that.