[gills]

This seems inevitable, and positive. There are some friends of mine who dislike the resulting job shedding and concentration of wealth; I am not quite sure how that will shake out.

It will be interesting to see if today's 'software' disruptors will themselves disrupted by software. Today's revolution seems to me, a changing of the guard from the massive inefficient people-driven gatekeeper to the massive and lean software-driven gatekeeper. I wonder if the evolution of this will lead to decentralization and eventual diminution of today's usurpers?

[pyre]

If things did lead to decentralization, I would celebrate such a thing. In general, decentralization wouldn't necessarily be the death of the software industry, just of centralized gatekeepers in specific areas. Things like Big Data(tm) (gathering and analysis) would be hard to decentralize.

[_urga]

Big data is exactly the kind of thing to decentralize: see p2p.

[pyre]

Someone has to gather all of the data into one place and crunch numbers on it to make it useful.