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Computers Reduce Efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox (2023)
I’ve harped on this in my sidewinder and slide rule blergs, as well as older ones: very often, using a computard is a recipe for failure, and old fashioned techniques are more efficient and u…
Robert Solow is a 99 year old MIT emeritus professor of economics who quipped in 1987 that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” I loathe economists as a pack of witch doctors with linear regression models, but the effect is large enough even they noticed. It is entirely possible that you might lower a worker’s productivity with a technology, as we saw with the British attempt to cut submarine design costs using CAD instead of using t-squares, pieces of graph paper and styrofoam models. All these “AI” goons fooling around with LLMs or larpy autonomous vehicle nonsense should be working on workaday stuff like depth estimation, affordance discovery and scene understanding, or other open problems in robotics.
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