this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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I’m a little confused by the opening paragraphs. So the advent of computers was hailed as a great productivity booster, but in the beginning, productivity actually went down.
Is the article seriously contending that computers have not improved productivity? So there were grandiose expectations of huge boosts that would arrive immediately - so what? That’s naive and dumb.
But in the long run, computers found their applications and people figured out how to put them to productive use. The world is unrecognizable today as a result.
So what’s the implication for AI? Thousands of CEOs admit that their hamfisted shoe-horning of AI into the workplace has done nothing? Big surprise. Are we just in the awkward adjustment phase, though?
You read that a bit wrong. Productivity didn't go down, productivity growth did.
Economists are for some reason unable to accept that their so called productivity doesn't grow infinetly. Every prognosis pretty much depends on a constant linear growth, so with a breakthrough in technology you would expect exponential growth.
But what somehow no one of them considers is the fact that human productivity has reached its physical limit hundreds of years ago and the only thing even leading to linear growth in the first place are these technological breakthroughs.
And that's also the current issue. We haven't had a major breakthrough in quite a few years. Sure everything gets better and easier to make, but nothing that happened in the last 20 years comes even close to the advent of PCs or the Internet as a whole. So the only way to keep your line from going up slightly less (not down, just slightly less up) is to reduce the number of workers while keeping your supposed output the same, i.e. firing people.
Its the desperate struggle of the current system (capitalism) that depends on the lie that productivity can go up infinetly.
If the ~~CEOs~~ Masters of the Universe can't figure out how to use AI in 3 years then it is impossible and a waste of time, okay.
I've been saying that since the 80s, just wait, this Internet thing is doomed to failure as prophesied by the CEO-class of yesteryear.