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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

A bit tangential, but I've wondered with AI where is the growth?

If you want to move up the stock, cost cutting is good, to some extent, but it has limits, competition can become more fierce, and the whole thing can become a race to the bottom, you cut cost, than you're forced to cut margins, and now you are no less profitable.

Growth requires new products, new markets, for people to spend additional money, to acquire more customers, etc.

A few companies are growing because their product is AI, so that's going to be new money coming in from people who want AI in itself.

But for those using AI?

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The one coherent theory I've heard is that the growth will come from all the new tasks done by the new software that we will have due to the severely increased programmer productivity.

Except that software has a very iffy history of contributing to overall productivity, the impact isn't severe by any measure (and negative by a few), and on the level of investment happening now we would need to increase the (already huge) size of "software" on our economy several times.

Process efficiency is about doing less to achieve an objective than you used to. This is the idea behind LEAN. If companies keep adding tasks then this is the exact opposite of LEAN. The only way doing more tasks makes sense is if said company is expanding into different markets, but that can be challenging and distracting from the core business (a reason why many non-core tasks are now outsourced.)

Software automates processes. Processes are currently designed with human decision makers in the loop. If you want software-enabled process to achieve maximum productivity then humans must be removed from the loop. This is the true objective of AI as it is being deployed and hyped today.

Software can do a lot of things. It can automate processes, it can help you optimize, it can make enough data accessible for you to not need a process, it can partition and generalize processes, it can control stuff...

The relationship between software and productivity is really not as simple as you put. But also, the AI being hyped today is completely incapable of removing humans from a process. Several other forms of AI do this, the one on the hype doesn't.

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