A few examples of technology that moved 'forward' but decreased productivity for those who moved with it from my 'lived' experience:

1) CASE tools (and UML driven development)

2) Wizard driven code.

3) Distributed objects

4) Microservices

These all really were the hot thing with massive pressure to adopt them just like now. The Microsoft demos of Access wizards generating a complete solution for your business had that same wow feeling as LLM code. That's not to say that LLM code won't succeed but it is to say that this statement is definitely false:

> Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.

> Technology moves forward and productivity improves for those that move with it.

It does not, technology regresses just as often and linear deterministic progress is just a myth to begin with. There is no guarantee for technology to move forward and always make things better.

There are plenty of examples to be made where technology has made certain things worse.

I would say it as "technology tends to concentrate power to those who wield it."

That's not all it does but I think it's one of the more important fundamentals.

Why is productivity so important? When do regular people get to benefit from all this "progress?"

"But with Google is easier!" When you were trying to teach your folks about Google, were you taking into consideration dependence, enshittification, or the surveillance economy? No, you were retelling them the marketing.

Just by having lived longer, they might've had the chance to develop some intuition about the true cost of disruption, and about how whatever Google's doing is not a free lunch. Of course, neither them, nor you (nor I for that matter) had been taught the conceptual tools to analyze some workings of some Ivy League whiz kinds that have been assigned to be "eating the world" this generation.

Instead we've been incentivized to teach ourselves how to be motivated by post-hoc rationalizations. And ones we have to produce at our own expense too. Yummy.

Didn't Saint Google end up enshittifying people's very idea of how much "all of the world's knowledge" is; gatekeeping it in terms of breadth, depth and availability to however much of it makes AdSense. Which is already a whole lot of new useful stuff at your fingertips, sure. But when they said "organizing all of the world's knowledge" were they making any claims to the representativeness of the selection? No, they made the sure bet that it's not something the user would measure.

In fact, with this overwhelming amount of convincing non-experientially-backed knowledge being made available to everyone - not to mention the whole mass surveillance thing lol (smile, their AI will remember you forever) - what happens first and foremost is the individual becomes eminently marketable-to, way more deeply than over Teletext. Thinking they're able to independently make sense of all the available information, but instead falling prey to the most appealing narrative, not unlike a day trader getting a haircut on market day. And then one has to deal with even more people whose life is something someone sold to them, a race to the bottom in the commoditized activity (in the case of AI: language-based meaning-making).

But you didn't warn your parents about any of that or sit down and have a conversation about where it means things are headed. (For that matter, neither did they, even though presumably they've had their lives altered by the technological revolutions of their own day.) Instead, here you find yourself stepping in for that conversation to not happen among the public, either! "B-but it's obvious! G-get with it or get left behind!" So kind of you to advise me. Thankfully it's just what someone's paid for you to think. And that someone probably felt very productive paying big money for making people think the correct things, too, but opinions don't actually produce things do they? Even the ones that don't cost money to hold.

So if it's not about the productivity but about the obtaining of money to live, why not go extract that value from where it is, instead of breathing its informational exhaust? Oh, just because, figuratively speaking, it's always the banks have AIs that don't balk at "how to rob the bank"; and it's always we that don't. Figures, no? But they don't let you in the vault for being part of the firewall.