I wanted to take a moment to address an obvious issue. In my last post, I discussed making sense of AI predictions and gave a framework to help, but how do you make sense of the absurd? After writing that post, I’ve seen imaginings of not a 10x productivity boost from AI but 100x and even 1000x. Not with some futuristic, cutting-edge technology yet to be developed, but with what we have today. Now is a good time to remind these people that the “x” after the number means times, although it seems to have morphed into a generic representation of “better.”

There is truth to their statements when they claim humanity isn’t prepared for 100x or 1000x productivity increases. This is true. We also aren’t prepared for a stampede of unicorns frying us with their laser beam eyes. A 100x or 1000x productivity increase is such a large number that it makes us mentally check out, insert the word “better,” and open the door for pointless pontification. Not to mention, this level of performance increase would be pointless in almost every context.

The Reality

Let’s think about this realistically, with some numbers. A widget factory produces a 1000 widgets per day. It then uses some magical AI dust to gain a 100x output boost, that’s 100,000 widgets a day. Now, at 1000x, that’s 1,000,000 widgets per day. In one year at full capacity, they’ll have 365,000,000 widgets vs. the previous output of 365,000. I hope they have a whole lot of storage.

Now, think of the developer who previously wrote 500 lines of code per day and now outputs half a million lines of code daily. Or, take the case of a prolific author who writes a book per year. Now, they are writing a thousand books per year. What should be clear by now is not only the absurdity of all this but also the larger problem: where are your 1000x new customers?

Output on this scale is meaningless without a massive increase in consumption. A 1000x productivity boost is pointless and possibly burdensome without a 1000x increase in consumption, aka customers and demand. Even with a scale-back in production, it’s still burdensome at this rate. I mean, unless you only plan on firing up the factory for a single day a year.

These things remind me of the Philip K. Dick short story Autofac, where automated factories keep replicating themselves and producing goods that nobody wants. Maybe the milk really is pizzled.

Y, Tho?

So, why are people claiming that 100x or 1000x productivity boosts could be on the horizon? Well, I can only assume because those numbers are bigger than 10x 🤷‍♂️ Even though 10x is already a massive productivity increase, bigger claims, bigger hype. People aren’t going to read your blog posts anymore if you are still 10x’ing. In the hype game, it’s go big or go home.

There is something about spelling out claims like this that makes the obvious flaws shine through. Putting numbers to this demonstrates the absurdity of the claims and should highlight a significant flaw in the logic. Of course, maybe there’s another likely scenario. People using ChatGPT to write their blog posts aren’t confronted with reality since they aren’t actually reasoning through the content they are churning out. They are too busy 10x’ing to realize flaws in their statements. Oh well, that’s a blog post for a different day.

People using ChatGPT to write their blog posts aren’t confronted with reality since they aren’t actually reasoning through the content they are churning out.

Real World Performance Boosts are Happening

There are certainly situations in which organizations can and even are gaining productivity increases using todays AI technology. These may even be doubling, tripling, or, in some rare cases, approaching 10x productivity increases, but these are highly specific, situational, and typically related to tasks and not the entire chain. Many of these areas are creative in nature: copywriting, stock photos, VoiceOver, and even video game design. All of these areas have seen massive productivity boosts from generative AI. Of course, we won’t get into a conversation on quality, but good enough is fine for many of these tasks.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that AI has the potential to transform our world in a wide variety of ways. This is both with the technology we have today as well as the technology we’ve yet to invent. There will be plenty of surprises, advancements, and things we didn’t see coming. However, we have to stop giving oxygen to people making outlandish and absurd claims. Remember, they aren’t making these claims for your benefit.