There's a wide variance in who captures the gains from technology, and most of it seems to come from whether the technology enables new transactions. Transacti

There's a wide variance in who captures the gains from technology, and most of it seems to come from whether the technology enables new transactions. Transactions are all that matter in a market economy; any work done that doesn't alter the terms of trade is effectively invisible (case: housework). Hence why corporations frequently try to deliver the shittiest products and customer service that will not result in them losing customers, employees try to do the least work possible that will not get them fired, companies aggressively expand into new markets and convert new customers, and employees hunt for promotions and job-hop into better opportunities. Your ability to capture leisure time for yourself is largely related to how well you can judge the minimum amount of work needed to not get fired and then execute on that while saving the rest for yourself; or, alternatively, how much value you can create when you do work so that you can bank the rest in financial assets and live without any further transactions. Hint: the former amount is usually more generous than you think it is, particularly if the latter is very high and you let your employer capture that value. Technologies that result in new transaction types result in large amounts of value being captured by their customers, as well as by the company delivering them. Think of YouTube: millions of people have been able to step into the market previously reserved for entertainers, broadcasters, news anchors, and other TV personalities, and in the process they've made billions for Google, millions for themselves, and cannibalized the whole industries of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. The Internet as a whole has created the top 5 most valuable companies on earth, worth a combined $10T+, as well as millions of other small businesses. Technologies that increase the efficiency of existing transaction types typically only enrich the companies that buy them, at least until they penetrate the market entirely, at which point they only enrich the company that sells them and are just table stakes for the companies that buy them. Think of say the high-availability mainframe market of the early 80s (Stratus and Tandem). When banks started using these to process transactions, bank tellers didn't capture any of this value, because it's not like a bank teller can go open their own bank using these machines. Contrast this to say the Apple II and Visicalc, where people could open up their own business because the technology let them cut expensive secretaries and accountants out of the loop. There's a deep connection between this idea and that of Disruptive vs. Sustaining innovations in The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive innovations are those that create new customers and new transactions, thus opening up new markets. Sustaining innovations are those that improve the efficiency of existing transactions and customer relationships. Sustaining innovations can widen your moat and increase the amount you can charge for your product, but they aren't going to form new businesses or unlock large market that you don't already have a foothold in. This is also why certain VCs get extremely excited about innovations like PCs, the Internet, cryptocurrency, and wearable/ambient computing. Communication, finance, markets, and proximity are the key building blocks that enable transactions; anything that fundamentally changes these systems is likely to be significantly disruptive. Meanwhile your SaaS that improves the efficiency of a niche industry by 5x is much less exciting, even though it has a higher probability of success, because you know exactly who your customers are and are unlikely to be able to create more of them.