AI and Productivity
Productivity in Australia in the 1990s grew by 2.2% a year. That slowed to 1.4% in the 2000s and 1.1% in the 2010s. Recent productivity performance is even worse, and hardly higher than a decade ago. Productivity Commission Almost all the low-hanging fruit in terms of productivity gains have been picked, so we have to move further along the path to human understanding. Can AI help? There is heavy promotion of LLMs (Large Language Models) to do so. LLMs were invented to avoid the “million hits” message from a Search Engine. In the early days (circa 2000), the Search Engine would treat the words in the request as key words, and search for them individually, so a dog park request would be searched as “dog” and “park”, and get many hits. Now, the Search Engine searches for “dog park”, gets many fewer hits, and takes the most popular one. This is fine for indexing, but the method has many obvious holes. Dog parks can be “segregated” according to size of dog, or the d...
