Has Productivity Peaked? 291
Putney Barnes writes "A columnist on silicon.com is arguing that computing can no longer offer the kind of tenfold per decade productivity increases that have been the norm up to now as the limits of human capacity have been reached. From the article: 'Any amount of basic machine upgrading, and it continues apace, won't make a jot of difference, as I am now the fundamental slowdown agent. I just can't work any faster'. Peter Cochrane, the ex-CTO of BT, argues that "machine intelligence" is the answer to this unwelcome stasis. "What we need is a cognitive approach with search material retreated and presented in some context relative to our current end-objectives at the time." Perhaps he should consider a nice cup of tea and a biccie instead?"
Re:No man is an island (Score:5, Informative)
The latest technology timeline released by BT suggests hundreds of different inventions for the next few decades including:
* 2012: personal 'black boxes' record everything you do every day
* 2015: images beamed directly into your eyeballs
* 2017: first hotel in orbit
* 2020: artificial intelligence elected to parliament
* 2040: robots become mentally and physically superior to humans
* 2075 (at the earliest): time travel invented
So, according to BT research, in 14 years time we are going to have computers sitting in parilament, in 34 years time there are going to be robots that are mentally superior to us and I may see time travel invented in my lifetime. Sorry if I don't take this stuff seriously. Wasn't it fashionable to predict this kind of thing in the 1950's?
Yes, some of their shorter term predictions are better, but I can make good short term predictions too.
Yes, if we follow his obscure assumptions (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, productivity has peaked if we adhere to his non-standard assumptions and definitions. His first assumption is that everyone is like him. I assume he's a writer, which involves a higher ratio of higher thinking to mundane tasks than average. I see EAI and data processing put people out of work (or allow an exisitng team to process more data) every day in the busines world.
Even if we focus on his narrow world, he says that a better search engine would help his job. But he labels all such improvements as "machine intelligence" and declares them out of bounds for the point he's trying to make which is that hardware alone will not improve his personal productivity. He's basically declaring all software improvements as out of bounds in order to declare the "peak of productivity".
Finally, I bet his productivity has improved since 2004 despite his protestations to the contrary. Wikipedia is much faster than search engines to get a neutral concise summary and handful of the most relevant links. Shall we take away the author's access to Wikipedia? He obviously doesn't need it.