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Could AI be the next big thing without impacting the economy and labour market?
Computers revolutionized the construction industry. CAD software makes it far easier to draw buildings and share the drawings. Phones makes communications vastly easier. Instead of a worker getting stuck or having to physically find someone they can make a video call. Manuals and documents are freely available online. Online shopping makes order parts cheaper and easier while allowing builders to press prices. Accounting, scheduling, recruiting sales and other supporting activities are easier with computers. Even on the construction site computers control machines. A modern truck is full of software.
Yet the productivity in the construction industry has flat lined and is if anything declining. Land prices can take some blame but renovating a building has not become cheaper.
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
I saw an Nvidia presentation where Ai can be used to simulate an assembly line or an entire factory or warehouse, including even modeling the physics of the entire process of moving and assembling goods. Surely, there will some productivity gains from all of this.
Why? Going from paper to digital was a much bigger step, and it created almost no productivity gains.
Didn't it?
In college I had a part-time job with the facilities engineers. They'd digitized the blueprints for every building on campus, plus the full history of change orders. Before that, they had to go down into the halon-equipped archive and pull out file drawers with the originals. Surely that led to some productivity boost.
A couple years back, I was talking to an elderly woman who had worked in Saudi Arabia in (I believe) the 80s. She did payroll for an American-run hospital system, and oversaw their transition from bags full of paper money to checks. It sounded like a real quality of life improvement for the employer. Employees were a little more reluctant, but today, paychecks are ubiquituous. Except they've also been superseded by faster, self-documenting digital finance.
Then there's programmers. Even mirroring your hard drives has got to be more convenient and more scalable than a couple extra filing cabinets of punch cards. I don't even want to think about how the programmers of yore attempted version control. The productivity gains from digitization were obvious.
I suspect these generalize to most data-based industries. We're just more likely to take the improvements for granted.
That's my entire point, It did... but it didn't. The gains in productivity from paper to digital were massive, they should have allowed us to carve out entire swathes of administrative bloat out of our systems, but instead the opposite happened. I have my own anecdotes from older people living through the digital revolution, and Nybbler got my point instantly - we just came up with more meaningless paperwork to fill, to compensate for the gains.
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