Is it possible that the marginal utility of software development diminishes over time? In a stagnant economy with stagnant analog technology, I think this is inevitably the case. It's natural for people to invest in the most productive areas first, so if things remain constant then the marginal value of software diminishes. I ask this because I'm curious for how sustainable the bull market for IT is.
On the consumer side of things, we've already gone from on average 1 hour a day online to twelve hours a day online over the course of fifteen years. This is an underrated point of the discussion, we're just running out of people we can turn into no life losers. It just seems like Youtube, TikTok, Facebook, etc are all fighting over an increasingly set pie. On the video game front, the library of past games is ever growing and you still have a bunch of people playing ancient shit like Star Craft. In the year 2000, you'd struggle to find anyone who would be playing a game made in the year 1990. Now, playing a game that's a decade old like Skyrim or even two decades like Age of Empires II is the norm.
I doubt we're ever going to see a bull market the size of the 2010s for software and IT again. The ability to software to proliferate an infinite amount of times is amazing, but it could also mean we as a society pick the most profitable fruit first and once certain things are sufficiently done, there's not much point in wasting the money to improve them further. I doubt there's going to be another goldmine like youtube again. To compare it to the oil industry, it's like if we used up all the highly profitable Saudi Crude and had to content ourselves with Canadian Tar sands.
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The future is contract artists
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Like any nodejs convention.
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