I recently toured the Pentagon and saw a historical diorama of an office from when the building was first constructed. Rotary phones. Typewriters. No computers.
It made me think about my own work.
Back in the 1980s, employees at my job were able to get a similar amount of work done as we do now—with vastly less technology. That raises an uncomfortable question: why?
There is a concept in economics called the productivity paradox. Major advances in technology—especially information technology—don’t always show up as the productivity gains you would expect.
Economist Robert Solow summarized it in 1987:
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
Economists still debate how much widespread IT adoption ultimately improved productivity. The answer is not a clean slam dunk. Some gains appeared later. Some may be hard to measure. Some may not have been productivity gains at all.
Which makes me wonder: if the gains weren’t primarily productivity, what were they?
- Convenience
- Better administration and recordkeeping
- Higher quality output
- Greater complexity and coordination
- New forms of busyness
- Reduced risk and more compliance
I increasingly get the sense that we have layered on more and more work with surprisingly little productivity gain—without regularly stopping to ask whether the additional work is actually helping us produce more value.
And now I wonder whether AI will follow the same path.