Why Does Browsing for a New Gadget Feel So Good?
From *“Yesterday, I Went to Mars ♡”* · 00:05:20
Show by MakotowillOlympusMons
This episode opens with a familiar feeling: the particular pleasure of browsing specs for a new device, imagining how much smoother everything could run, how many tasks might finally get handled — before the purchase arrives and the floor looks exactly the same the next morning.From there, it draws a line to a Reuters report on SpaceX raising roughly $40 billion partly for AI infrastructure. What stayed interesting wasn't the scale of the ambition, but what backed it: the quiet, recurring revenue from Starlink subscriptions and routine launches. Ordinary ongoing work, underwriting an extraordinary bet.It touches on a concept economists call the productivity J-curve — the observation that when electricity first entered factories, simply replacing steam engines with motors changed nothing. Output only improved after entire factory layouts were rebuilt around the new reality. A talk by Sarah Hunter of the Reserve Bank of Australia adds texture here: AI adoption has spread widely, yet around 35 percent of businesses reported no productivity improvement, and roughly 30 percent said only marginal gains. The investment is surging; the results are still catching up.There's also a practical note on what introducing any new tool actually looks like up close — shelves moved to make room, manuals read, workflows renegotiated with staff, a stretch of feeling busier and more scattered than before the machine arrived.A quiet look at the gap between imagining a better future and doing today's unremarkable work — and the possibility that those two things aren't as separate as they feel when you're scrolling through a spec sheet.
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