In the 1980s, economist Robert Solow made an observation that reminded economists of today’s AI boom: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
You read that a bit wrong. Productivity didn’t go down, productivity growth did.
Economists are for some reason unable to accept that their so called productivity doesn’t grow infinetly. Every prognosis pretty much depends on a constant linear growth, so with a breakthrough in technology you would expect exponential growth.
But what somehow no one of them considers is the fact that human productivity has reached its physical limit hundreds of years ago and the only thing even leading to linear growth in the first place are these technological breakthroughs.
And that’s also the current issue. We haven’t had a major breakthrough in quite a few years. Sure everything gets better and easier to make, but nothing that happened in the last 20 years comes even close to the advent of PCs or the Internet as a whole. So the only way to keep your line from going up slightly less (not down, just slightly less up) is to reduce the number of workers while keeping your supposed output the same, i.e. firing people.
Its the desperate struggle of the current system (capitalism) that depends on the lie that productivity can go up infinetly.
You read that a bit wrong. Productivity didn’t go down, productivity growth did.
Economists are for some reason unable to accept that their so called productivity doesn’t grow infinetly. Every prognosis pretty much depends on a constant linear growth, so with a breakthrough in technology you would expect exponential growth.
But what somehow no one of them considers is the fact that human productivity has reached its physical limit hundreds of years ago and the only thing even leading to linear growth in the first place are these technological breakthroughs.
And that’s also the current issue. We haven’t had a major breakthrough in quite a few years. Sure everything gets better and easier to make, but nothing that happened in the last 20 years comes even close to the advent of PCs or the Internet as a whole. So the only way to keep your line from going up slightly less (not down, just slightly less up) is to reduce the number of workers while keeping your supposed output the same, i.e. firing people.
Its the desperate struggle of the current system (capitalism) that depends on the lie that productivity can go up infinetly.