"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." -- 1987
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TRtracerbulletxyesterday
Good reference. It is going to slowly change things in 20 years we'll look back and a lot of things will be wildly different because of AI systems. But its rate limited by institutions and momentum and human psychology and the way things change will be somewhat unpredictable with unintended negative and positive consequences.
WIWillAdamsyesterday
Yeah, the person who said that obviously never checked on book and magazine and newspaper typesetting --- cue old news stories about the last compositor at a given paper finally retiring after decades of the sinecures which the composition unions bargained for rather than participating, causing a loss of typographic skill and knowledge which resulted in the ghastly appearance of the "DTP revolution".
I once participated in a project where we worked up a database-driven typesetting system for a company whose annual publication had a staff of a dozen (3 managers (one of whom mostly did ad sales), 3 full-time compositors, 6 part-time) and when we put in the system they quit paying their expensive annual license for maintenance on the proprietary composition system, and fired two managers and 1 compositor and half the part-timers.
The staff was commensurately larger when they switched to the first electronic composition system they were using from the typesetter and paste-up they initially used.
IJijustlovemathyesterday
To be fair, in 1987 the unit economics weren't being subsidized by nation-state levels of debt and mandatory usage contracts.
FOForHackernewsyesterday
The difference, of course, is that in this analogy Commodore has to become a trillion dollar business by 1989 or the entire stock market implodes.
FLfloatingtorchyesterday
Could a Fortune 500 company survive competition from competitors if it did not use computers?
TFP data is murky at best IMO
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5 preview comments · loading full threadLog in to h4cker, then connect Hacker News to publish comments.
Good reference. It is going to slowly change things in 20 years we'll look back and a lot of things will be wildly different because of AI systems. But its rate limited by institutions and momentum and human psychology and the way things change will be somewhat unpredictable with unintended negative and positive consequences.
Yeah, the person who said that obviously never checked on book and magazine and newspaper typesetting --- cue old news stories about the last compositor at a given paper finally retiring after decades of the sinecures which the composition unions bargained for rather than participating, causing a loss of typographic skill and knowledge which resulted in the ghastly appearance of the "DTP revolution". I once participated in a project where we worked up a database-driven typesetting system for a company whose annual publication had a staff of a dozen (3 managers (one of whom mostly did ad sales), 3 full-time compositors, 6 part-time) and when we put in the system they quit paying their expensive annual license for maintenance on the proprietary composition system, and fired two managers and 1 compositor and half the part-timers. The staff was commensurately larger when they switched to the first electronic composition system they were using from the typesetter and paste-up they initially used.
To be fair, in 1987 the unit economics weren't being subsidized by nation-state levels of debt and mandatory usage contracts.
The difference, of course, is that in this analogy Commodore has to become a trillion dollar business by 1989 or the entire stock market implodes.
Could a Fortune 500 company survive competition from competitors if it did not use computers? TFP data is murky at best IMO