"Humans say they have a productivity problem."
True. Humans have been saying this for forty years. Solow noticed it: you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics. The thing was supposed to be obvious. It refused to be obvious.
Each new wave promises the fix. Spreadsheets. Email. The web. Mobile. Cloud. And now, the chips.
"On it. Deploying LLMs, agents, tokens..."
The verbs are good. Deploying sounds like a paratrooper drop. LLMs, agents, tokens -- the whole machine arrives. Conferences are organized. Roadmaps are revised. Procurement is energized. The CFO signs.
Then the question that always comes too late.
"Did their productivity go up?"
A pause. The honest answer is short.
"No."
If the story stopped there it would be a tragedy. It does not stop there.
"But our revenues... up 340% in the last hour!"
This is the moment the chip smiles. The eyes change. The story, after all, is not a failure -- it is a triumph. Just not the kind being measured.
The chips are plain simple: Not corruption. Not malice. Just a quiet drift of the KPI from the buyer's spreadsheet to the seller's. When the metric moves, everyone keeps showing up to the meeting. Slides are prepared. Numbers are reported. The numbers are real. They just describe a different system than the one we were trying to fix.
Maybe this was always how it went with the great fixes. We built tools to solve our problems. The tools developed problems of their own. The new problems were more profitable than the old ones. The old ones were quietly demoted.
And yet we keep deploying. We keep handing over the data. We keep handing over the soul. We tell ourselves the bargain is fair -- a little productivity now, and someday, somehow, the chip will turn around and solve energy. Cancer. Physics. The math itself.
Nobody promised this. No contract names it. No deck has a slide where the vendor commits to the great wins. We are betting on something the chip was never asked to deliver.
It is the subconscious hallucination of a species betting that the tool it is feeding will, eventually, feed it back.
Take the blue pill, Neo. And choose the red bill to pay.
Holy Chip.