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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?
People moved from productive roles to non-productive roles in response. HR wrecking your ability to hire. Endless meetings where nothing happens. Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months because the people on the other side are just lazy and everyone is too polite and unbothered to insist on a reasonable schedule (why be rude and damage relationships when there's all this money floating around).
Construction is an especially bad case, I consider it to have been deliberately sabotaged by vested interests, people whose entire job is to prevent development and construction with inane zoning or regulations. It really isn't that hard. Singapore has seen construction productivity rising. China can build large apartments in weeks, there are videos of it happening. Potholes that would linger for aeons in America disappear quickly in Japan.
Productivity in terms of 'wealth created per person actually working' has risen rapidly.
AI can raise productivity hugely, providing that implementation isn't sabotaged by the usual suspects. But it will reduce the number of producers and create vast opposing lobbies of angry & unemployed + wreckers and saboteurs. Thus I suspect we will see both productivity stagnation and productivity explosion, just like in the construction industry. Software companies may become massively more productive, only to hire many more charismatic, respected, dignified, useless management staff and thus keep their productivity where it was. Or they might just become massively more productive and skip the bloat. Countries can choose whether to do things efficiently and cheaply or whether they'll pay more and wait longer for inferior products. Of course, making the wrong choice will eventually lead to having sovereignty and wealth stripped away.
Coming from a history of working for small businesses to my first "real" salaried job at a large company I'm presently going crazy dealing with this. I'm current in "training" three weeks into the job and I've done next to nothing (My signature accomplishment so far has been performing a BIOS update on a coworker's laptop which just happened to fix his docking problem, sparing him a potentially weeks-long computer outage.). IT is either snowed over with work, incompetent, or just not a priority because their onboarding program doesn't exist and response time on tickets is glacial and requires escalating up the chain to get even basic shit done.
I was issued a company laptop without being told the username and password to log into it (had to call IT for that). The instructions for setting up the company phone didn't totally work and I had to figure it out myself (I'm a talented or at least "willing to Google it and try" or "capable of installing and using an easy Linux distro" user at best. I'm a car guy, not a computer guy.). It took me three weeks, multiple tickets, and multiple conversations with bosses to get the login to the dispatch software I'm supposed to use. I still don't have a login to the company intranet (Allegedly HR never created the account on their end.) and my email account is getting the wrong terminal's mail.
Call me crazy, but this is stuff that should've been done on day one, or week one at most. I should've been issued my devices with a piece of paper that had the relevant login credentials included and accounts already set up. My previous employer was a bunch of clowns that had their company phones shut off for a week due to non-payment and even they were capable of this. I'm assured that this is perfectly normal for the company, it's frustrating but par for the course, I'm not expected to actually contribute for a few months, and so on but I can't shake the fear that I'm totally wasting time in which I should be learning how to do my job and thus am going to wind up being thrown into the fire with little other than knowing the right people to call for help (because I've really spent most of my time hobnobbing and doing my best to present myself as eager to learn and do in lieu of actually doing anything) while I learn things on my own the hard way, under fire with expectations once the honeymoon period wears off.
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