from Hacker News

Computers Reduce Efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox (2023)

by gtt on 5/2/24, 8:28 AM with 87 comments

• by virtue3 on 5/5/24, 11:35 AM

  I think this article is drastically downplaying how dramatically more complicated designs and things are now than they were before.

  I don't believe it's computers that are to blame; I believe it's complexity nightmare problem.

  We have much tighter tolerances for everything now; everything "does more" and relies on my components.

  Back when we used pen and paper to create military vehicles it was mostly JUST about performance and completing the objective. There wasn't thousands upon thousands of other requirements and features (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable).

• by constantcrying on 5/5/24, 12:44 PM

  It definitely is true that a design which could easily be created by hand is harder to create on a computer. The things where computers shine are actually managimg the complexity of a large and complicated systems.

  What I think the article leaves unspoken (but implied) is the "curse of tools", if you give a person tools he is likely to use them, even if they might not be applicable. Meaning that someone might decide to create a complex solution to a problem, simply because the tools he has been given allow him to do so. I think it is always very important to keep in mind what has been achieved with the very limited tools of the past and the immense ingenuity of the people who worked within those limits.

• by paulsutter on 5/5/24, 12:35 PM

  SpaceX Raptor engine was designed using a full engine combustion simulator, without which the engine would have been impossible [1]. Not to mention the rapid evolution from Raptor 1 to 3 [2]

  Jet aircraft are 70% more efficient since 1967, largely from simulation [3], similar in automotive

  Unclear how the NVIDIA H100 would have been designed by hand-drawing 80 billion transistors

  Net-net: Computers necessary, but we need much better UIs and systems. Maybe AI will help us improve this

  [1] https://youtu.be/vYA0f6R5KAI?si=SG1vLMMl8l3DuCYN

  [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/spacex-raptor-3-engine...

  [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft

  > Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes.

• by matheweis on 5/5/24, 12:56 PM

  There are at least two dimensions to this that I believe that the author has overlooked:

  1. Economies of scale. It may be that drafting something up in CAD takes more cycles to get right up front, but once you have an established design it is much easier to reproduce it by orders of magnitude

  2. Changes in software. Software companies are ever changing their interfaces, decreasing productivity every time their users encounter this learning curve.

• by joeatwork on 5/5/24, 12:28 PM

  Something this article leaves out is that mostly, when people are given better tools, they don’t just produce more widgets per unit time: often instead they build different (more complex, better) widgets. When I was in school I read a study about this - a design shop had N draftsmen, they introduced CAD tools anticipating reducing the staff, and when researchers went back to the shop they had the same staff, but they were designing things that wouldn’t have been practical or possible before.

• by Nevermark on 5/5/24, 4:57 PM

  Under appreciated: Automation creates, or dramatically enhances, the need to fully understand problems and solutions at the most detailed and practical levels. Because automation removes the valuable manual ad hoc flexibility to adapt to most wonkiness.

  1. When a job requires a mix of human and computer work, productivity changes are very dependent on interface details. Even one slightly confusing GUI, slowness of feedback, a tool that isn't quite as flexible as a job needs, or an inability to see/edit/use related information at the same time, can greatly harm productivity.

  2. When a job is completely automated, productivity can go way up. But this productivity doesn't get attributed to human workers, it is corporate productivity. And then only if this highly optimized task really provides value. There is a lot of performative information processing, with conjectured long term payoffs, serving the needs of management and tech workers to look busy, and believe they are valuable.

  For both human and corporate productivity, automation makes it extremely easy to decrease productivity due to the most subtle mismatches between problems and solutions.

  When work is done by hand, these mismatches tend to be glaringly obvious, less tolerated, and more easily mitigated or eliminated.

• by flavaz on 5/5/24, 9:02 AM

  A classic example of this would be how some roles require endless spreadsheets, or individual updates to a CRM tool like Pipedrive.

  CRM tools add a lot of overhead to what should be a simple process- letting your manager know what you’re up to.

• by geysersam on 5/5/24, 8:53 AM

  Nobody can convince me computerization has not improved efficiency in industrial manufacturing. But computerization has probably lead to fewer people working in manufacturing. Did overall efficiency decrease or increase?

• by gieksosz on 5/5/24, 9:39 AM

  At first I thought it was written in the 80ies, then I saw the author mention 1995 and it began to feel very strange that someone from the mid 90ies would rant against computers. Then I reached a section about LLM …

• by AndrewKemendo on 5/5/24, 3:02 PM

  I build architectures for major systems and in every case I start with a blank paper in a Strathmore 400series Sketchbook

  About 4 years ago I made a wall of my office into a chalkboard and that’s been where I work out massively complex interdependencies and data workflows

  Nothing on a computer remotely compares to the speed and specificity of pen or chalk in hand

• by nitwit005 on 5/5/24, 8:15 AM

  Case studies from the 80s, as productivity started improving again in the 90s.

  I can actually remember Alan Greenspan discussing this, despite how young I was.

• by dahart on 5/5/24, 4:03 PM

  The financial services industry has been revolutionized by computers, I have no idea why the author thought that would make a good example. Today’s stock markets & high frequency trading & online banks & international finance didn’t (and can’t) even exist without computers. The explosion of personal investing and day trading that has changed trading doesn’t exist without computers.

  The entire computer industry itself has accelerated and grown because of computers, nowhere has he accounted for the “productivity” attributed to sales of computers. Fields I’ve worked in, video games and CG films, have absolutely increased efficiency with computers: for equal sized productions, the quality has gone up and the workforce needed has gone down over time consistently for decades.

  The article has only one single and completely vague datapoint that includes anything from the last 30 years, that’s a major red flag. The invective portmanteaus and insult words are also a red flag and very weak argumentation. Is that supposed to make up for the complete lack of any relevant data? Not to mention some of the insults are worse than iffy by todays standards and don’t reflect well on the author.

  Call me rather unconvinced, I guess.

• by rdlecler1 on 5/5/24, 3:09 PM

  This analysis ignores the impact of competition. A car produced today is better (and more complex to make) than a car produced in 1980.

  Technological productivity isn’t just about improving the number of units or dollar value produced/hours input. Technology can make products more competitive without any increase in productivity by making them better, and, therefore more attractive, to customers even if unit cost or volume stays fixed.

• by spit2wind on 5/5/24, 11:52 AM

  Nice meta analysis examining the situation from the perspective management versus measurement: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4801131_Measurement...

• by smeej on 5/5/24, 3:51 PM

  I'm noticing a version of this as I pilot switching to a handwritten bullet journal for task management. I'll still sit down at the computer to brainstorm and organize the tasks of my projects, because being able to move list items around is a huge advantage, but when it actually comes to doing the darn things? It's been so much more effective to track them in the notebook. Planning out my daily schedule, figuring out what I can do in which timeframe, and making sure things don't fall through the cracks has worked so much better on paper.

• by cushychicken on 5/5/24, 1:19 PM

  Something tells me this guy is one of those people who thinks version control is a newfangled process step and not a useful piece of a development cycle.

• by courseofaction on 5/5/24, 3:03 PM

  There are better explanations for the general downturn of productivity despite better tools: Increased focus on extraction since the expansion of neoliberal policies in the 70s.

  https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

• by Samtidsfobiker on 5/5/24, 12:27 PM

  I too have wondered why it take so long to make stuff in CAD, and why even suggesting that everything should fit together the first time is laughable at best.

  My theory is that computers can't do rough sketching. No CAD software suite (I think) can iterate and evalute rough ideas as fast and flexible as whiteboard pen in a meeting room can.

• by sobellian on 5/5/24, 8:17 PM

  Am I nuts, or does the first graph show exactly the opposite of his claim? He says it shows declining productivity, but labor productivity rises. Costs also rise but this is exactly what one should expect from labor-saving devices, no?

• by hcks on 5/5/24, 12:21 PM

  “Computa*” this is insane

• by TazeTSchnitzel on 5/5/24, 8:45 AM

  What's with a lot of the mentions of “computer” using what looks like a portmanteau with “retard”?! I know some famous people like Stallman do this, but I don't think it's perceived positively.

• by dopylitty on 5/5/24, 12:57 PM

  For similar reasons to those mentioned in the article it's possible the past century will be seen as a dark age by future humans. Computers are incredibly fragile and depend on complex systems (eg the electricity grid) to even operate. They also can't persist data even across several decades reliably. Yet we've created a society where nothing can be done without a computer and all our data is stored in computers instead of physically.

  When those complex systems fail and the computers stop working we'll be left without any traces of the knowledge generated in the past century or the people who generated it. We'll also have lost all the previous knowledge that was moved from physical to digital storage.

  All future humans will see from the century is a whole lot of microplastics.