3 ms·
An interesting article, however the trend described might be a superficial one. Replace "software" with "paper" and the same arguments could be made for the eco
by smackay 15y ago
An interesting article, however the trend described might be a superficial one. Replace "software" with "paper" and the same arguments could be made for the economy 100 years or more ago. That indicates that the real driving force is something more fundamental (productivity is mentioned several times here) that could result in software being replaced with something better.
- eliben 15y agoI've heard this argument before, but I'm not convinced by it. There's a vast difference between paper and software. Paper is bounded - it's just paper. Yes you use it to organize matters more efficiently (although the Babylonians were just fine - thank you - using their stone plates 4000 years ago), but there it ends. Software's biggest difference from everything else is its being fully meta. It keeps growing. Abstractions keeps being added. Compare software in the 60s and today - some of us earn our bread by writing code for tools that other people use to create other tools, that IT companies use to provide computing to traditional businesses. And another level of abstraction isn't far away - when it's needed, it can be added. I don't know of any field of human knowledge similar to this aspect, which is why software is here to stay. Asimov had this story about all jobs being pre-assigned according to genetic abilities. Just one job wasn't pre-assigned, and that was allocating and assigning jobs (I may be badly mis-remembering... sorry...). Software is this job.