Worth Reading – The AI Productivity Illusion
This is some food for thought:
Productivity Is About (Much) More than Finishing Tasks Quickly
AI has nearly doubled the number of app releases released per month. But overall, the number of apps with significant use has started to decline. The mere production of more stuff is not creating new economic value when it comes to app development. We shouldn’t be surprised if that pattern repeats in other white-collar fields where generative AI is still struggling to catch on.
https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/the-ai-productivity-illusion
The core question in the post above is pretty simple. Generative AI has helped people finish tasks more quickly and probably completed more tasks, at least when their time is not taken up with cleaning up the slop from poorly generated work, but there haven’t been any widespread economic productivity gains.
What if we’re completing more tasks, but they have no value? I think we can see this in the online world pretty clearly: AI can push out blog posts, newsletters, and podcasts at a ridiculous speed, but is it growing those markets, or just producing a ton of stuff that no one reads? Is your personal AI helping you push out more corporate communication that no one has time to read?
That’s not effective communication; it’s the opposite, in fact.
What if all we’re doing is pushing out white noise at such a fast rate that it’s not worth paying for anymore? What then, AI investors?
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