[kurthr]

I think that the amount of software produced has gone up by much more than a million fold since 1950. The first thing I would consider software and not flipping hardware switches was Assembly Language described in a book by Kathleen and Andrew Booth in 1947 and the phrase Assembly was first used to describe it in 1951. Even that is normally called firmware today.

That doesn't really mean to me that we have another million or billion-fold increase in utility coming, unless we're just counting lines of code. I don't need 1000 more apps on my phone or computer. Are we saying that every webpage and video is software, because they're already encoded in js and H264? or is it just the browser? the OS? How much more do we really need or even want?

Is it just that soon we'll all need to have "agents" working for us to protect us from the other "agents' that are trying to steal what we have? Is that the utility? Who's going to pay more for it?

It seems like we're already at the point where we pay about as much as people are willing to for software. It's already gone to the subscription model. You're already the product for advertising. It's already being enshitified to eke out some extra margin. It's already ~10% of GDP. It just can't grow much more without adding some new utility rather than just replacing what's already there. It needs to create something other than unemployment.

But if it doesn't create anything new, it will be the Tractor to Jevon's Paradox.