One can always argue the computer is doing more of the work. Sitting there watching the production line doesn't look very productive or challenging?

Enabling or keeping productivity going is also important. That is what people watching line and fixing minor things are paid for. Alternative is that someone would be pinged from home and they would drive to line each time. While during time productivity of line was lost.

Labour productivity in economics is output per labour hour, it doesn't matter what is doing the work. As an extreme example, if robots took over and human labour is no longer required for anything then (human) labour productivity would be infinite, it doesn't matter if no humans are actually doing any labour.

Did the computer revolution really make things that much more efficient? Great savings and new possibilities on many fronts, but also enormous expenses and a whole lot of lost flexibility and individual agency.

I'm sure it is an efficiency win on the total, but perhaps not as gigantic as often assumed.

Do you see typing pools in every large office anymore? Nope, word processors replaced all of them. Do accountants spend several weeks calculating desk sized spreadsheet by hand anymore? no because excel and other digital spreadsheets are able to tabulate data automatically. that's all major efficacy savings

Yep, major savings from those two things. But then someone in this efficient office decides to automate a few more workflows and spend 200k building a digital paper form that is used four times per year and misses a crucial field so that is not "supposed to be needed", so that every use of the form requires a phone call or five. This would not have happened with a paper form and human first recipient.

There is an efficiency gain in total, but a lot of losses that eat at the actual wins.

I mean, how much we talking here? We're not in Atlantis with flying cars, but there's immense efficiency gains in logistics.

That is a tricky one. I've been told early on that in most discussions one may not ask netzen to do anything for you.

We could have been mowing your lawn or filling my taxes. That is how I remember it anyway. If you just help drink my beer we both get things out of it.

GOOD point!

> massively increased everyone wages due to increased efficiency

a computer won't increase the wage of someone whose work is unrelated to the procurement of the computer/system (even if their work was made more efficient).

For example, a checkout clerk now dont need to compute, because of the efficient Point-of-Sale system (when previously they'd need to recall prices). So even if the output of the clerk is now higher, they could be less skilled and so the supply increases, leading to lower wages.

The people whose job is to procure the computer systems _do_ get increased wages. That's why so many software engineers are rich.