[pessimizer]

Software produces very little concrete benefit. It is largely used in derivative industries like marketing and finance in order to gain advantage over competitors. The only software that will result in general productivity gains is in control systems. Advancements in those are slower than they've ever been, simply because the low and medium hanging fruit has been picked, and we're down to a dependency on artificial intelligence methods to squeeze out more value. There's no particular reason that AI would be easier now than 60 years ago other than that transistors are infinitesimal and cheap and that data storage in massively dense and cheap, hence big data and an obsession with storing everything possible (which with no basis is presumed to have effective AI as some sort of emergent effect.) It has thus far not been very productive either.

Productivity is dropping because we can't just ride on the improvements in transistors any more. We are going to have to figure out ways to arrange society that will allow us to maintain output while reducing the drain on resources of the financial and marketing sectors themselves. They've become so massive that squeezing them could provide productivity gains for decades.

The only way that Ubers are more productive than taxis is due to the economies of scale created by monopoly. A person working multiple jobs through multiple marketplaces is far less efficient that someone working one job. If the metaphor is a multitasking operating system, you're disregarding the overhead of context switching. We're in a nadir of productivity.