Claims of increased productivity rest on the affected people and organizations actually being able to measure productivity which - aside from traditional manufacturing processes - is often very hard to do if not borderline impossible.
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@fire_garnet 100%. But you can at least measure actual products. How do you do that for creative work, science, art, social work etc?
@tante I kid you not, my employer tried to measure it via number of PRs merged (!!!) and, within a short period of genAI usage being mandated, the goal was achieved, and the number has stayed relatively flat since, lol.
Nice KPI you got there. Oh you told your workforce it'll be used to measure productivity? It'd be a shame if the number were gamed, wouldn't it?
Oh, it was? Who could've foreseen it?
And even if there _is_ a measurable increase in productivity, it might still just be an artifact of necessary but unproductive work being backloaded, causing a short-term improvement in productivity but leading to negative effects and a worse outcome overall in the long term.
Want to increase the productivity in a kithcen for half an hour? Stop cleaning as you go. Want to decrease the overall productivity of a kitchen throughout the day? Stop cleaning as you go.
@tante we are years into it and trillions of dollars in the hole. millions of deploymens across all sectors of the economy, globally.
aggregate productivity numbers would up by now.
maybe time to stop looking at tech as a driver of productivity, and more as a risk and rent seeking.
@tante there's a million ways to measure - the problem is often the correct interpretation and not jumping to conclusions.
@tante It's also a little bit funny that "traditional manufacturing processes that can have their productivity effectively measured" is also a very niche category because as soon as you're making multiple things, have any quality checks that can fail products(and maybe introduce rework), or like a hundred other possible permutations your measurable metrics can start diverging from your 'actual' productivity(as measured per machine/per person/etc.).