Re:U.S. workers have gotten way less productive. No one is s...
by godelski on Monday October 31, 2022 @06:15PM
(#33414065)
> I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive.
I'd ask another question: did lawsuits decrease? I'd imagine that a lot of this software is to avoid lawsuits. America is especially litigious and that's got to correlate strongly with the increase bureaucracy.
I also suspect that a factor at play is that people are losing trust in the whole system. Most people now know that productivity has skyrocketed while salaries have remained relatively flat. With increasing economic disparity (not even just the West) it is no wonder that people become less productive. Who tries hard at a game that they believe is rigged against them? (doesn't matter if it is or isn't, just the belief)
> People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems
Because historically it has. But there are different types of tech. Tech enabled the modern world. It is the new medicines we have to cure illnesses that devastated populations. It is the chemicals that enable us to grow enough food to sustain our populations. It is everything from a wheel to the computers we use to make more efficient wheels that use less resources. But it is also naive to think that tech alone can solve every problem. It is also naive to think that tech can't create new problems. To create tech that solves problems we need to think long and hard about the intricate complexities involved and gather the expertise from relevant domains (an often missed, but essential, component). The other problem is that people hand wave away things like climate change saying "tech will solve it" rather than investing in said technology and waiting for it to magically appear. I do think tech is an important tool in solving many of the problems we face, but you're right that they are not all technology dependent (which is a continuous scale of weights, not a binary option).
Also, we're a tech forum. Peoples' expertise here is in tech. So they see things through that lens and it is also very likely that the most we/they can contribute to solving these problems is, in fact, through technological means. The trick is to remember that tech isn't a cure-all and that the problems we face are exceedingly complex. Over simplifying is often harmful.
I'd ask another question: did lawsuits decrease? I'd imagine that a lot of this software is to avoid lawsuits. America is especially litigious and that's got to correlate strongly with the increase bureaucracy.
I also suspect that a factor at play is that people are losing trust in the whole system. Most people now know that productivity has skyrocketed while salaries have remained relatively flat. With increasing economic disparity (not even just the West) it is no wonder that people become less productive. Who tries hard at a game that they believe is rigged against them? (doesn't matter if it is or isn't, just the belief)
> People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems
Because historically it has. But there are different types of tech. Tech enabled the modern world. It is the new medicines we have to cure illnesses that devastated populations. It is the chemicals that enable us to grow enough food to sustain our populations. It is everything from a wheel to the computers we use to make more efficient wheels that use less resources. But it is also naive to think that tech alone can solve every problem. It is also naive to think that tech can't create new problems. To create tech that solves problems we need to think long and hard about the intricate complexities involved and gather the expertise from relevant domains (an often missed, but essential, component). The other problem is that people hand wave away things like climate change saying "tech will solve it" rather than investing in said technology and waiting for it to magically appear. I do think tech is an important tool in solving many of the problems we face, but you're right that they are not all technology dependent (which is a continuous scale of weights, not a binary option).
Also, we're a tech forum. Peoples' expertise here is in tech. So they see things through that lens and it is also very likely that the most we/they can contribute to solving these problems is, in fact, through technological means. The trick is to remember that tech isn't a cure-all and that the problems we face are exceedingly complex. Over simplifying is often harmful.