PW 4: Productivity and tools

It’s a little depressing that these days we mainly use computers to consume fast and react fast. Task management turns us into more productive human machines. Rather conveniently for managers, human machines have higher predictability and lower inherent value – they’re easy to automate, replace, and erase.

Productivity is important, but it’s just on... See more

I think productivity is really a race to the bottom um it's I think that the that a lot has been said about how humans uh or machines are trying to be more human but I think less has been said about how humans have for decades uh been trained to be machines

and we have a lot of unlearning to do because if we focus on efficiency and optimization and

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The big economic reason why we can’t explore our potential as we might is that it is hugely more productive for us not to do so. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith first explained how what he termed the ‘division of labour’ was at the heart of the increased productivity of capitalism. Smith zeroed in

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Software tools and courses can aid intellectual advancement and productivity at certain margins, for some people, but we should be more explicit about what exactly they can help, how they can help, and whom they can help.

The lack of exponential increase in labor productivity is sometimes used as an argument that tech innovation has slowed down in recent decades — that the big innovations like electric power and the car are behind us and more recent inventions have been more minor in impact — that the narrative of accelerating progress toward Singularity is bogus in... See more

In most every other area of our economy, not only is productivity a well-defined concept, but it’s often central to how work unfolds. Indeed, much of the astonishing economic growth fueling modernity can be attributed to a more systematic treatment of this fundamental idea. Early uses of the term can be traced back to agriculture, where its meaning

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important point here: these systems are much better at doing tasks than jobs. and giving people better tools to do their work faster often leads to qualitative changes in what they can do. (of course, over the long run, we expect these systems will be able to do all of some of… Show more