Where has all the productivity gone? (2021)

I think diminishing returns, as the author starts to allude to near the end of the post, is a big reason. To take the example of word processing, the biggest improvement to my workflow of the past 10-15 years is probably either being able to collaborate on documents simultaneously or to be able to view them on a phone. I actually edit documents simultaneously quite a lot, but I’m not sure it’s a huge productivity boost or that common.

The biggest productivity boost I&#x27;ve ever had is switching from excel 2003 to 2007. Before I had a limit of 65k rows, now I had just over a million! A whole new world in calculation had opened up.<p>I can&#x27;t really recall anything that&#x27;s come out since then that matches it.

so where is all this productivity that we are supposed to be getting from AI? I&#x27;m struggling to see it in my business or my personal life.

Into the pockets of the 1%

Human labour isn&#x27;t all that important in a modern economy, what matters is the capital (hence why capitalism is so successful). To be productive, we need to be building&#x2F;deploying new capital.<p>The real capital investment seems to be happening in East Asia. Building productive capital in the West has typically been somewhere between discouraged and illegal in favour of playing games with numbers. In the English speaking world we&#x27;ve even managed to disconnect GDP from energy and now people are confused why GDP goes up but real living standards don&#x27;t change all that much and everyone is shifting to fixed-pie thinking.