"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." -- 1987

Good reference. It is going to slowly change things in 20 years we'll look back and a lot of things will be wildly different because of AI systems. But its rate limited by institutions and momentum and human psychology and the way things change will be somewhat unpredictable with unintended negative and positive consequences.

Yeah, the person who said that obviously never checked on book and magazine and newspaper typesetting --- cue old news stories about the last compositor at a given paper finally retiring after decades of the sinecures which the composition unions bargained for rather than participating, causing a loss of typographic skill and knowledge which resulted in the ghastly appearance of the "DTP revolution".

I once participated in a project where we worked up a database-driven typesetting system for a company whose annual publication had a staff of a dozen (3 managers (one of whom mostly did ad sales), 3 full-time compositors, 6 part-time) and when we put in the system they quit paying their expensive annual license for maintenance on the proprietary composition system, and fired two managers and 1 compositor and half the part-timers.

The staff was commensurately larger when they switched to the first electronic composition system they were using from the typesetter and paste-up they initially used.

To be fair, in 1987 the unit economics weren't being subsidized by nation-state levels of debt and mandatory usage contracts.

Could a Fortune 500 company survive competition from competitors if it did not use computers?

TFP data is murky at best IMO

The difference, of course, is that in this analogy Commodore has to become a trillion dollar business by 1989 or the entire stock market implodes.

Came here to say this as well.

It took decades for effects of personal computing to show up in aggregate statistics.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox and https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/163298.163309

edit: My comment is not exactly right, its more about general computing rather than personal computing

Only a few curmudgeons at this point are claiming there is nothing, nothing whatsoever, to AI.

The question is really about the fate of the current build out. For those of us who have extensive experience with AI, which is to say, those of us here, because we are probably the only people not only using it day in and day out but potentially using multiple sessions of it all the time, I think it's not so surprising that it isn't necessarily immediately radically transforming every industry everywhere. Even as it has rewritten the minute-by-minute process of doing my job entirely, it hasn't actually changed my job all that much at the higher level and it's hard to assign much more than a 2x or a 2.5x overall improvement to it once I account for all the Amdahl's Law issues that come up from the parts that have not been so amenable to acceleration.

And without unit testing, continuous integration testing, pull request review, the fact that the AI is building code which is itself a highly reviewable artifact rather than just doing whatever directly, and all the many many guard rails we've built up in our industry that happen to be extraordinarily amenable to use by automated systems, I still wouldn't trust AI all that much for a real task. They still bang into those guard rails a lot, and still make what I consider to be deeply suboptimal decisions far too often to take my hands off the wheel. With all the stuff we have in the programming space they are a game changer, but in a field that doesn't have anywhere near that much padding and safety nets I'd be way, way more hesitant.

I want to say it's weird to talk about such things when they are also capable of such amazing math proofs, but at the same time when you consider the numbers tossed around for how much those things have cost, I think you're seeing another space that has guard rails comparable to software engineering. By contrast to the way these AIs are working, when a human solves a comparably hard problem the human tries a few things but from the outside would seem to proceed almost directly to the solution, compared to the staggering amount of blundering about the AIs do before arriving at their solutions. Now, in terms of the final results, yeah, they got there and I won't deny that. I'm just saying that in fields where the acceptance criteria are nowhere near as sharp as math or software, they're operating at a significant disadvantage still.

And at that point, there was no much productivity gained ... and not nearly as much debt as now. The industry was also not such a huge part of stock market, GDP, etc.

Dotcom bust - 2000

I guess this bubble has some room to run!

I came here to say same thing :-)

5 years ago it was the crypto bros quoting this

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This seems like a poor comparison, for any given company, benefitting from personal computing in 1987 was a significantly harder task than using AI tools in 2026 is.

The first requires a fundamental shift in not only how you work but expensive and complex infrastructure changes from the company itself just to make it possible (the first Mac for example would cost about $7000 per person in today’s money and would be outdated in maybe a year or two), an office building of The latter requires asking a subscription service to do a task for you on basically any computer connected to the internet.