Are you putting your money where your mouth is and creating a startup then?

If not then a) don’t diss the mba folks b) you don’t have as much conviction as you claim c) if you are then send a link so I can review?

Cheers

Maybe they are speeding up things that were not the bottleneck or don't matter. Or LLMs speed up the time to learn, "well this idea probably sucks actually", which is great, but in the end there is still no good idea. For software dev, it had already gotten pretty efficient before LLMs came around - the business of making software demanded it. There are still gains to be had no doubt, but many will have less impact.

I'm using claude to make gaming mod apps I never would have bothered to code before, but they have zero monetizable value. There is demand for sure, but somewhat ironically, copyright/IP/TOS law stands in the way. The thing which committed the biggest copyright infringement in human history lets me make another thing which I can't release because of copyright law. I'd get cease-and-desisted instantly if I did so.

The latest BCG report I saw on this was the one from this summer that found that employees are saying they're saving time, but businesses still haven't figured out how to turn that into dollars.

And employees self-reporting that they saved time doesn't necessarily mean they actually save time. Humans are famously crap at estimating that sort of thing.

But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks?

Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?

This. Positive sum games are deflationary. Economic policy can, and has, offset the deflation of techno capital growth.

Indeed, although there are also pressures pushing banks to lend out money regardless of created wealth. This is why there's so much investment into stupid things like AI - they call it TINA or "There Is No Alternative" (to put your dollars into). The scale of AI is as big as it is because there were huge pools of money sloshing around looking for things to invest into, that's the underlying problem that caused the RAM crisis, not AI itself.

And, perhaps more to this particular point, it came too late for vendors behind the dotcom boom. Lucent Technologies no longer exists. WorldCom no longer exists. Cisco is a shadow of its former self, with a stock price that only recovered last year.

The dotcom bubble burst because the development of the internet could not keep up with expectations, even though investors were correct in principle with their assumption it would generate swaths of wealth. For AI the hope is that AI itself will start to push its own development and adoption sooner rather than later, so the timing issue that killed dotcom investors might instead make AI investors insanely rich. That's why we're still seeing heaps of money getting dumped into it.

Ah yes, the "Accelerando"[0] dead galaxy where all life's dead and only automated corporations remain.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando

#1 is still mostly just moving money from the poor to the rich. Most people working for a wage are going to be in the bottom 80%, yet the top 20% own over 80% of the stocks.

That's very much not what happened in the Industrial Revolution. Hand weavers were relatively well-paid, and the new factories were more likely to employ the urban poor - including kids - than to give jobs to people who used to be hand weavers.

It took maybe a century and a half for the modern consumer economy to appear. And it didn't happen until money started being shared into the wider economy for political reasons, not technological ones.

Meanwhile the enclosure of common land was catastrophic for rural populations. Sources of food and pasture disappeared as the Big Houses took them over and turned them into huge single family estates.

> The historical precedent is those people get other jobs

Heh, got fired from my old company for reasons not connected to AI. Then couldn't find job. AI suggested one that is perfect for me, helped me put up webpage (I can do everything from electronics/firmware/backend/iot/cad, but nice webpage is not something I can do easily), then helps me every day to learn new things and make useful products I always wanted to make. And I found something safe for now from AI and big companies - making old equipment work with new systems. No one will touch it, because you have only small projects here and can't extract a lot of value at once, but a single person who can do anything with some help from AI can carve out a whole niche.

I think such solution - thousands of small niches by small entrepreneurs (1 person companies) who can use AI for some small skill they are lacking - are our future and they will absolutely extract a lot of money from people, who hope to make some more money with small optimisations of already working businesses. One example of such small optimisation - making a slightly better wood drying controller for small woodmill owner. He already put up small cabinet with cheap tuya controllers and needs to control them though atrocious app. Now I can make a small module that will add several more sensors, give him some simple dedicated control panel on webpage. Not even medium company would make such small product, because planning phase alone would cost more than what I can charge for whole system and do it in a week.

And it all started with one prompt - "Given my CV, what single person job would you recommend?"

There's two things.

LLMs can use PowerPoint, but also LLMs can write the raw document file directly without the software. One time I asked for a letter and what came out was it doing that.

What really matters with this though is reading other people's documents, whatever format they happen to be in. PowerPoint isn't the only game in town for creating slide decks, but if you want to be sure you can read all the ones sent to you, it used to be the case you'd need a copy.

Used to be. Now the AI can read and summarise the slides for you.

("AI, expand these bullet points into a slide deck" -> "AI, condense this slide deck into bullet points", as the meme goes).

If there are no humans looking at the excel anymore, why is it needed? My guess is all of this office software gets replaced by stuff that looks a lot more low level and controlled by agents, and just converted to a nice view when a human wants to look for some reason.

You can't imagine AI keeping the format and replacing the software? Or making it possible to create cheap clones with some customised features?

I very much can.

That applies to most software.

This doesn't solve the problem of "Who gets paid now, and for what?" at all. If anything it makes it worse.

I’d argue productivity is declining in this context.

The PowerPoint object is meant to be a package of one’s insights. If those insights are of zero value (the less time you spend the less value - correlation) - that time expended is a net negative for he firm’s productivity.

> You think its implausible for AI to replace some fraction of white collar workers?

Yes, it is. Software already did it. Better software (AI) can only marginally change what's already automated.

If that white collar work disappears, so does most of the demand in the entire economy.

Agreed. The literal CEOs of these companies, and their acolytes, have been proudly proclaiming that you can replace all types of workers with AI. We know they have their anti-human sentiments but this is nothing new, as you said.

If it's any consolation, in the end it will destroy capitalism too.

Fair… how many (ballpark) of these people do think are there? Where do they get the money to pay the workers currently?