Ho it has! I quite disagree. It allowed garbage code to be implemented. It stole art from artists. It was used as an escuse to lay people off. It wasted the time/misinformed users looking for actual information. And finally it solidified the idea that mediocre is ok. Good enough. Low effort, etc...

Maybe what they mean is it has had no impact on their own productivity since doing less than jack shit is hard.

Well that's a lie. ai has demonstratively reduced productivity. Managers have layed off employees thinking that ai will adequately replace them, and the remaining employees being forced to use ai hate it.

I think there's some non apples to apples comparisons being made when they say no productivity increase in stats with advent of computers.

When I started working it was drawing CAD on screen and doing a lot of measurements to place things that needed 3d distances. Those drawings then were made into template sections for a wood pattern model maker to sculpt a pattern, then do a layup to get a product, that then went to a pentagraph machine to duplicated the shapes into steel.

Then we got 3d solids and surfacing, so we could skip the 2d mockups and eventually get rid of the wood pattern stage.

If a change to a radius was needed we had to delete it and untrim, re fillet and trim the surround faces by hand and stitch back into a 3d closed model. This could take a whole day I'd it was a fillet across complex faces.

Now you can adjust the model on the fly and just type the size of the fillet change you want, the model updates in seconds, the CAM program auto updates.

What took 6-8 weeks of processes, is now 1 day.

So where did the extra time go? More time to check if design will perform mechanically, dimensionally and thermally, so you don't have a failure and have to rework the designs and steel multiple times. If they ignore rework for the product lifecycle then yeah maybe the time doesn't look like it got saved on a project. But there is a heapload of saved effort and rework by using computers, as well as not scrapping steel blocks .

The Solow Paradox never went away, it just got rebranded. Every decade a new technology promises to transform productivity, executives pile in with breathless claims, and then the numbers quietly disappoint. What makes this cycle particularly absurd is that the same people making the AI productivity promises are the ones buying the AI. If the technology actually worked as advertised, wouldn't the CEOs be the first to notice?