Something I don't see addressed here is how much of software is an arms race. I think this reality is hidden a bit from people who have only ever worked on comm

Something I don't see addressed here is how much of software is an arms race. I think this reality is hidden a bit from people who have only ever worked on commercial software that exists for the purpose of creating economic value. A lot of software doesn't have that purpose and exists mainly for defensive reasons. I have spent most of my career working on fielding new software systems for the intelligence community and the DoD. We can't say we haven't seen productivity gains in the form of many processes being automated to the point we can scale them much larger and process much more data. But this isn't economic productivity. 60 years ago, satellite imagery involved dropping film from the satellite on a little parachute and intercepting it before it hit the ground, developing the film, and deploying any improvements in imaging capabilities by launching a new satellite. Now we can do almost all of that with radio and software and we have virtually the entire globe covered, a near non-stop stream of imagery constantly being turned into possibly useful and actionable intelligence depending on what the interest is in knowing what is happening in that region. But in terms of what we're doing, much of it is economically purely a sink. We're monitoring foreign ports, known locations of military units, missile silos, to maintain the strategic advantage of not being caught with our pants down if anyone out there ever decided to launch a large-scale conventional attack. A lot of people would probably argue what we're doing is pointless, fighting yesterday's wars while losing today's. Maybe. I'm not really trying to make an argument either way for whether this activity is useful or not. But it's not increasing American economic output, and it's not intended to. But it is an incredibly expensive and enormous scale application of deployed software technologies. It's effectively a new category of cost for the world's major military powers. They now need to spend on maintaining an enormous development pipeline and operational environment for software capabilities that bring no economic gain, but just keep them from being overtaken by their enemies. You do see some patterns like this in commercial software, especially in the real of information security. We may or may not be able to easily deploy huge force multipliers to make our workforces more productive, but then we find they have vulnerabilities in them and we've exposed ourselves to a new kind of criminal taking advantage of that and extracting some of that value. So we devote more and more resources to securing these systems, often making them less efficient and more difficult to use in the process. We have to do it, because the added security is at least some of the time ultimately worth it due to the enormous cost of a breach. But it's purely defensive spending. You're not making your system any more effective at producing whatever it is your company produces that creates economic value. Often, you're making it less effective at doing that.