And if you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that 100 people has to read, but it now takes 10% longer to read and understand, you’ve lost overall value.

And like the article says, early computerization produced way more output than anybody could handle. In my opinion, we realized the true benefits of IT when ordinary users were able to produce for themselves exactly the computations they needed. That is, when spreadsheets became widespread. LLMs haven’t had their spreadsheet moment yet; their outputs are largely directed outward, as if more noise meant more productivity.

Maybe the take is that those reports that people took a day to write were read by nobody in the first place and now those reports are being written faster and more of them are being produced but still nobody reads them. Thus productivity doesn't change. The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better.

Not necessarily. You could have 100 FTE on reports instead of 300 FTE in a large company like a bank. That means 200 people who'd normally go into reporting jobs over the next decade, will go into something else, producing something else ontop of the reports that continue to be produced. The sum of this is more production.

Looking at job numbers that seems to be happening. A lot less employment needed, freeing up people to do other things.

What happens if (and I suspect this to be increasingly the case now) you make someone 3x faster at producing a report that nobody reads and those people now use LLMs to not read the report whereas they were not reading it in person before?

Then everyone saves time, which they can spend producing more things which other people will not read and/or not reading the things that other people produce (using llms)?

Productivity through the roof.

> The real gains from AI show up when it changes what work gets done, not just how fast existing work happens.

Sadly AI is only capable of doing work that has already been done, thousands of times.

This is the natural result when the value of businesses is not strongly related to their actual output.

The most hyped use cases for AI/LLM make me wonder, "why are we doing this activity to begin with? We could just not."

I suspect that we are going to see managers say, "Hey, this request is BS. I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" while employees say, "Hey, this response is BS, I'm just going to get ChatGPT to do it" and then we'll just have ChatGPT talking to itself. Eventually someone will notice and fire them both.

"What would you say you do here?" --Office Space

And the fact that you can make it 3x faster substantially increases the chances that nobody will read it in the first place.

What a load of nonsense, they won't be producing a report in a third of the time only to have no-one read it. They'll spend the same amount of time and produce a report three times the length, which will then go unread.

Not a phase, I’d argue that 90% of modern jobs are bullshit to keep cattle occupied and economy rolling.

> This is an underrated take. If you make someone 3x faster at producing a report nobody reads, you've improved nothing

In the private market are there really so many companies delivering reports no one reads ? Why would management keep at it then ? The goal is to maximize profits. Now sure there are pockets of inefficiency even in the private sector but surely not that much - whatever the companies are doing - someone is buying it from them, otherwise they fail. That's capitalism. Yes there is perhaps 20% of employees who don't pull their weight but its not the majority.