alt Hacker NewsThis is actually an old syndrome with technology. It takes a longt ime for the effect to be reliably measured. Famously, it took many years for the internet itself to show up in significant productivity gains (if the internet is actually useful why don't the numbers show that? - a common comment in the 1990s and 2000s). So it seems to me we're just the usual dynamic here. Productivity in trillion-dollar economies do not turn on a dime
>Famously, it took many years for the internet itself to show up in significant productivity gains
Yeah but the actual productivity gains that the internet and software tools introduced has had diminishing returns after a while.
Like, are people more productive today when they use Outlook and Slack than they were 20 years ago when using IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Sametime? I'm not. Are people more productive with the Excel of today than with Excel 2003/2007? I'm not. Is Windows 11 and MacOS Tahoe making people more productive than Windows 7 and Snow Leopard? Not me. Are IDEs of today offering so much more productivity boost than what Visual Studio, CodeWarrior and Borland Delphi did back in the day? Don't think so.
To me it seems that at least on the productivity side, we've mostly been reinventing the wheel "but in Rust/Electron" for the last 15 or so years, and the biggest productivity gains came IMHO from increased compute power due to semiconductor advancement, so that the same tasks finished faster today than 20 years ago, but not that the SW or the internet got so much more capable since then.