It has always been the case. As a society we are still very far from having harnessed the full power of 90s era computers. Companies routinely pay hundreds of workers and even executives, to do things that computers are better at doing. For instance: managing plannings in big organizations.
It was out of an old movie. Folders and coffee cups absolutely everywhere. Walls of well-used filing cabinets. The directors office was comical, you had to look over the piles if you were sitting. 15 year old computers were there but second fiddle.
Honestly it was charming and made me nostalgic. It was also a reminder of exactly what you’re saying. Millions worth of NYC rentals run by a paper-driven org. The future is distributed unevenly indeed.
CS and educated tech people in general are in a hyper-educated bubble where it is normal to talk about distributed systems and algorithmic complexity, but there are an awful lot of smart people without those backgrounds.
A lot of knowledge that's traditionally branded as "technical" is IMO generally useful, but overlooked. For example basic queuing theory in of itself is exceedingly useful. Nothing fancy, just the steady-state, blocking probablity, what chance of how many "clients", etc.
I witness very large (gov) organisations lacking any kind of in/out flow modeling, statistics, etc. No dashboards, no insights. Just going by feel. Everybody is "overworked", but if you dare to say it might be a good idea to start quantifying some of those parameters you'll be in a very silent, very awkward room and will never be asked anything ever again. I wish I was kidding.
AI? Let's start previous-century level process automatization and professionalization first and we'll see in a few decades if we're anywhere near ready for the next step.
Edit: It's btw interesting that most (high-level) managers at these orgs are all alphas, like history and political science majors. I guess it's no wonder they are trying to solve production problems through "consensus" and endless meandering, but it's also frustrating.
Yes, but the thing is: it takes time to write the software. We had proof of concepts for some serious game-changing things written and working over a year ago, but organizationally it takes a long time to write and deploy the things and get them into production. Even if LLM's didn't get any better than they are right now, there are still years' worth of ground-breaking improvements we could roll out but those will take time to write and deploy the software and reshape the business processes.