Post

Columnist Stephen Rattner probably got screwed over by the headline writer, but I'm seriously floored at how poor a job these six charts do at showing that we need AI.

Take the first chart. The argument here is that productivity increases have been low in the US since the postwar period, so we need AI. See anything missing?

Yeah. Exactly. Evidence that AI will increase productivity. Instead we get a few cherry-picked anecdotes.

And why are the 50 years are the anomaly, not the shorter early post-war period? Meanwhile Rattner must know how feeble it sounds to ascribe postwar US growth to delayed benefits of electricity rather than the postwar world order, government investment in R&D, women entering the workforce, etc...

And talk about having it both ways. Solow was wrong about computers not increasing productivity, Rattner argues, but we need AI because productivity didn't increase. Similarly, if Solow was so completely wrong, why didn't the gains of the 90s persists?

The next five graphs are even less convincing, and the argumentation becomes even weaker. It was almost impossible for me to imagine how a seemingly intelligent person could have written it—but I found a secret clue buried in the text itself.

Just the general idea that increasing productivity benefits anyone but the richest people is pretty stale. The last 50 years show us that this is a false hope. It would have been better for most people to have falling productivity with redistribution.

Well I guess if their share is shrinking, it's all the more important that workers' productivity increases

Narrator: They did not support UBI

Occasionally they float the letters UBI like a spray of perfume on the breeze, and then they go back to dropping hundreds of millions on ad campaigns against corporate taxes

I suppose this chart is meant to suggest that technological innovations magically delivered workers the 40 hour work week, rather than decades of labor organizing & the FDR administration's New Deal & labor laws?