9 ms·

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zer

1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually. Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone. Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.

_s_a_m_ 15d ago
"art"
lackoftactics 15d ago
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle. How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
- ryandvm 15d ago
  Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
  - archagon 15d ago
    It's pretty clear to me that the primary value-add of AI is as an enshittification accelerator. (At least in the commercial sector.)
    - jijijijij 15d ago
      The primary value of AI is solving problems AI created and becoming an inefficient interfacing layer for things it made functionally obsolete.
- fzeroracer 15d ago
  I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away. With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.
  - threetonesun 15d ago
    I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users what they need. The idea of writing down every idea and letting AI crap out the features is entirely antithetical to creating good software.
    - GPerson 15d ago
      In his memoir Stephen King says not to write your ideas down since the good ones stick around anyway, and that a notebook is a way to immortalize bad ideas.
    - aldous 14d ago
      Paul McCartney maybe? "We were writing songs that were memorable, not because we wanted them to be memorable but because we had to remember them"
      - threetonesun 14d ago
        Had to refresh my memory, but it was "If it ain't worth remembering, it ain't worth writing down.", from Ronnie Van Zant.
watwut 15d ago
The article starts by video companies being as profitable as ever. Issue is not with economics not being there.
s_dev 15d ago
Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc. You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.
- jijijijij 15d ago
  Every masterpiece or visionary work, which suffered late recognition is evidence against your proposal. If art is shaped by popular demand only, you will get nothing but the most comfortable, unchallenging, forgettable popculture fluff imaginable.
- s1artibartfast 15d ago
  Why would anyone want that model of consumption? It seems terrible. I don't want to invest in a director to make a movie I may or may not be interested in
- fzeroracer 15d ago
  In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways. This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.
  - izacus 15d ago
    That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas? Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.
rurp 15d ago
> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it. Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube. If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.
zetanor 15d ago
>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it. On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?
- bugbull 15d ago
  What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.
  - deleted 15d ago
    [deleted]
  - joquarky 15d ago
    I just wish there were an option to buy a game, like we used to. Now every mobile game seems to prefer you watch ads every 2 minutes with no option to pay to disable them. There are even mobile ads for other games which proudly boast "no ads" and then they still have ads. Nothing has meaning anymore.
  - sfn42 14d ago
    The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics. It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example. Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages. I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.
unleaded 15d ago
As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.
- axus 15d ago
  I felt the television industry and gaming industries were in fact ruined by those trends. Or at least ruined in the same sense that global warming ruins our environment.
asdff 15d ago
I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder. I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle. I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists. Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.
- roosterIllusi0n 15d ago
  Engineers are not the CEOs. The CEOs are gaslighting to justify another self enriching layoff. AI decisions and control sits with a handful of grifting CEOs. Engineers get no say.
- munificent 15d ago
  > I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. >* NYT is now 10x as thick?* One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now. > Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of your life that's spent is the same. The attentional cost is equivalent even if the value someone derived from it is not. > I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. Almost no one can make a living writing poetry any more. That means the hypothetically world's best poet probably doesn't exist because that requires a time investment that simply isn't available except among the idle rich. The trend is going that way for photography, music, and fiction. In order to be truly gifted, you need a massive amount of time to hone your craft and it's very hard to find that in an economy that doesn't pay you to do that. > Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met. I agree. Hand-made stuff is good. But imagine a world where every fast food restaurant charged five cents for an entire meal. Home-cooked meals would still be superior, but how often would the average person summon the time and willpower to make them? And in that world, how good do you think the average home cook would get?
jacquesm 15d ago
Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.
- adventured 15d ago
  Actual supply hasn't done anything consequential. Extreme increases in generation + publishing are not occurring in a way that impacts the typical user. The typical TikTok user is not seeing a 10x or 100x increase in published tiktoks from the people they follow. The same goes for YouTube. Absolutely nothing of consequence has shifted, at all. The typical Spotify user is not seeing a flood of quality music that they have to sift through. There is no actual curation problem. The AI garbage is overwhelmingly and easily being ignored by the masses. They're just shrugging and going back to listening to their favorite music, or back to listening to their favorite podcasts, and so on. The premise of supply to infinity is nothing more than an empty (and now aged) talking point that has turned out to be false. It'll be trivial to find the next Hendrix, easier than ever in fact. AI sucks at making interesting music (short'ish term problem), and it can't play an instrument live to save its life (substantial problem). Fans want to see Taylor Swift live more than they want to listen to her mp3s or discs by a radical margin. They want to watch Swift perform on YouTube videos, or at the Grammy's, they want to watch her in interviews. They're fans. AI can't stand on stage and do jack squat, it has zero charisma, zero stage presence. Nobody cares about AI.
b0rtb0rt 15d ago
metal gear solid 2 predicted all of this 25 years ago
- bluefirebrand 15d ago
  And Kojima's predictions in MGS2 were based on writings by Richard Dawkins in the 70s
eviks 15d ago
> a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. Indeed, so there is no limit on how much of supply can simply be ignored, so 100x every year doesn't need to push anything off the rails. And in reality there is no 0 cost, the marginal cost isn't about pushing bits in the wires
huurtehoog 15d ago
"[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Herbert A. Simon Simon is a fantastic author that everyone alive today would to well to read. He gets misrepresented by Karp in his manifesto: "He envisioned that by the 1980s humans would be essentially relegated to kinetic tasks, confined for the most part to labor that required movement in the physical world." Hm, doesn't sound like Simon. Let's see Karp's notes on that source: "He envisioned that: See Simon, New Science of Management Decision, 38 (arguing that “men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery”)." Ok. Seems to support Karp's interpretation. But let's follow Karp's recommendation than and see the source: "I have done some armchair analysis of what this proposition means for predictions of the occupational profile twenty years hence. I do not have time to report this analysis in detail here, but I can summarize my conclusions briefly. Technologically, as I have argued earlier, machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Economically, men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery (e.g., operating earth-moving equipment), some kinds of non programmed problem solving, and some kinds of service activities where face-to-face human interaction is of the essence. Man will be somewhat less involved in performing the day-to-day work of the organization, and somewhat more involved in maintaining the system that performs the work." A much more nuanced and qualified take. Published in 1977, I would say that in may ways work and organizations in developed economies largely evolved like he foresaw given how the service sector came to dominate the economy and so much human effort now goes into software development, configuration and supervision instead of pushing paper with their hands into and from drawers as it was done in the 1970s.

_s_a_m_ 15d ago

"art"

lackoftactics 15d ago

This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle. How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.

ryandvm 15d ago
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
- archagon 15d ago
  It's pretty clear to me that the primary value-add of AI is as an enshittification accelerator. (At least in the commercial sector.)
  - jijijijij 15d ago
    The primary value of AI is solving problems AI created and becoming an inefficient interfacing layer for things it made functionally obsolete.
fzeroracer 15d ago
I think as a developer this is one of the biggest takeaways I've had from this whole thing. I used to view features sitting endlessly in a JIRA backlog as a bad sign; a signal that we weren't prioritizing the right thing. But in reality this serves as a natural selection mechanic; if devs don't care enough about it to get it done and PM doesn't see the value in it then it slowly fades away. With agents you can just throw them at every JIRA ticket and get them (badly) implemented. There's no rhyme or reason if it's needed or even wanted, and spending time to think about it is 'wasted'. So the numbers on the burn down chart go up, but actual productivity is stagnant or becomes negative as unnecessary bloat sneaks into your app or game.
- threetonesun 15d ago
  I'm a big fan of forgetting. I throw out the phrase "forgetting is the point" a lot, loosely paraphrased from some musician (I forget who!) that said if you couldn't remember the lyrics they must not have been very good. Somewhere in the original spirit of Agile there was no Jira board, because the next thing to do was obvious to the team, and if it wasn't obvious it was easily discoverable, just go ask some users what they need. The idea of writing down every idea and letting AI crap out the features is entirely antithetical to creating good software.
  - GPerson 15d ago
    In his memoir Stephen King says not to write your ideas down since the good ones stick around anyway, and that a notebook is a way to immortalize bad ideas.
  - aldous 14d ago
    Paul McCartney maybe? "We were writing songs that were memorable, not because we wanted them to be memorable but because we had to remember them"
    - threetonesun 14d ago
      Had to refresh my memory, but it was "If it ain't worth remembering, it ain't worth writing down.", from Ronnie Van Zant.

watwut 15d ago

The article starts by video companies being as profitable as ever. Issue is not with economics not being there.

s_dev 15d ago

Let it collapse get rid of patents and copyright. They are holding us back. People will assume that means that you can copy and distribute for free and profit without work. You already can. The business model will have to shift to collecting money BEFORE making something rather than trying to collect it AFTER making. You want a new Christoper Nolan film on his new idea, invest in it. That investment is a risk. Once made the money is made people can copy and distribute however they like. In a cinema, on a DVD, on a streaming site etc. You've pointed it out yourself, we have these old notions of economics that we apply to a new world where it simply doesn't make sense.

jijijijij 15d ago
Every masterpiece or visionary work, which suffered late recognition is evidence against your proposal. If art is shaped by popular demand only, you will get nothing but the most comfortable, unchallenging, forgettable popculture fluff imaginable.
s1artibartfast 15d ago
Why would anyone want that model of consumption? It seems terrible. I don't want to invest in a director to make a movie I may or may not be interested in
fzeroracer 15d ago
In a world without patents and copyright, there's nothing stopping companies from just hiring the Pinkertons or something to threaten you into compliance. These sort of 'if we just get rid of patents things will be great' ideals will just benefit large corporations with the capital to get their way anyways. This doesn't mean our current system of patents and copyrights doesn't favor them either especially as they shred it to train their AI models but it's not a system you can fix by simply tearing it all down.
- izacus 15d ago
  That's just absolute nonsense, where do you get these kind of ideas? Just because you don't have monopoly on your stupid ideas, you don't get to hire Pinkerton's to beat others.

rurp 15d ago

> something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it. Unfortunately this is completely opposed to the goals of the companies creating AI. An org like Google for example couldn't care less if people are viewing quality art and having their lives enriched by it, but they love it when people spend endless hours viewing slop on youtube. If we as a society want more of the former it won't happen with the help of leading AI companies, it will only in direct conflict with them since the two goals are in direct opposition.

zetanor 15d ago

>people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone I've refunded more games than I've kept on Steam over the past decade. While there's now a much wider pool of games, there's not necessarily a much deeper pool of games. Since trash sells and since marketing a game has been absurdly difficult recently, I can imagine that there's plenty of people who would have made a good game, but who instead (quite rationally) decided against it. On the flip side, the firehose of trash has pushed me to mess around and make little demos, so who knows?

bugbull 15d ago
What I’m really shocked is that mobile gaming is as dire as it is. My iPhone from some years back was capable of running full blown Civ6 and earlier total war games. Despite the hardware clearly being capable of running interesting, complex games, the market is dominated by shitty gacha games, copy paste puzzle games and scams.
- deleted 15d ago
  [deleted]
- joquarky 15d ago
  I just wish there were an option to buy a game, like we used to. Now every mobile game seems to prefer you watch ads every 2 minutes with no option to pay to disable them. There are even mobile ads for other games which proudly boast "no ads" and then they still have ads. Nothing has meaning anymore.
- sfn42 14d ago
  The problem is that the mobile touch screen interface is complete ass. There are people who play all kinds of games on mobile, for example I know there's some league of legends games on mobile and I think there are some first person shooters etc bu i wouldn't even consider trying them personally, simply because I'm not interested in trying to use the touch screen to control complex game mechanics. It can work for simpler concepts like card games, Balatro comes to mind for example. Also personally I think the whole concept just appeals to less discriminating audiences. I never play any game that can be described as pay to win, I don't care how good it is, if you can pay for progress or advantage I'm no longer interested. But mobile games seem to both facilitate the pay to win and generally just value-extracting systems with app store purchases etc, and appeal more to people who are willing to pay ridiculous amounts of money for progress and advantages. I did play one pay to win game while I was on vacation once, it's called The Tower and its honestly completely stupid. I tried playing it for free and it kind of just makes it impossible to progress at a satisfying pace without payment, then you have to pay significant amounts like $20-50 for relatively minor upgrades, a conservative player just buying the "necessities" to enjoy the game would probably end up spending way $50-100 or more, and it doesn't end there. The discord had people bragging that they'd spent like $40k on this stupid low effort mobile game. The studio makes millions on a monthly basis. It's ridiculous.

unleaded 15d ago

As long as AI is only able to create crap that people are embarrassed to admit they watch (which I think is likely IMO just given how it works) I think we'll be mostly fine. Trash TV didn't ruin the television industry and mobile shovelware didn't ruin the gaming industry.

axus 15d ago
I felt the television industry and gaming industries were in fact ruined by those trends. Or at least ruined in the same sense that global warming ruins our environment.

asdff 15d ago

I'd argue that supply isn't really increasing. I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? NYT is now 10x as thick? Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? Not at all. Seems output in this brave new AI era is more or less the exact same as it was in the dark ages. The only output that has gone up, logarithmically at that, is spam and other low effort fodder. I also want to push back on the idea that content is "solved." Consider the fact that you could be born in 1810 or 1910 or 2010 and in each of those eras, have more content available for you to read than you could ever read in your lifetime. People tend to enjoy contemporary stuff vs exclusively reading classics, and therefore there is constant demand for new stuff of quality in principle. I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. I mean after all, technology has come up with dozens of new ways to commodity just about every medium of art there is for mass production, and yet, for every medium of art there is there are still sought after and celebrated artists. Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met.

roosterIllusi0n 15d ago
Engineers are not the CEOs. The CEOs are gaslighting to justify another self enriching layoff. AI decisions and control sits with a handful of grifting CEOs. Engineers get no say.
munificent 15d ago
> I mean, are we seeing 10x as many movies being released? 20 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. >* NYT is now 10x as thick?* One random site I checked says there are 600 million active blogs right now. > Every source of quality has upped its quantity by 10x? I made no claims about quality. If you spend two hours watching Citizen Kane, or two hours watching loot boxed unboxing videos, the fraction of your life that's spent is the same. The attentional cost is equivalent even if the value someone derived from it is not. > I think writers who are trying to become truly gifted writers aren't going to be out of demand in the future. Almost no one can make a living writing poetry any more. That means the hypothetically world's best poet probably doesn't exist because that requires a time investment that simply isn't available except among the idle rich. The trend is going that way for photography, music, and fiction. In order to be truly gifted, you need a massive amount of time to hone your craft and it's very hard to find that in an economy that doesn't pay you to do that. > Provenance has value. That is something that technologists often forget coming from engineering backgrounds, where everything they interact with is commodified and provenance doesn't matter at all, only the binary of if the spec is met. I agree. Hand-made stuff is good. But imagine a world where every fast food restaurant charged five cents for an entire meal. Home-cooked meals would still be superior, but how often would the average person summon the time and willpower to make them? And in that world, how good do you think the average home cook would get?

jacquesm 15d ago

Supply has just become near infinite, that means all of the value is now in curation rather than creation, and to pick out the good stuff is now more work than it ever was. Good luck finding the next Jimy Hendrix, Picasso or Doris Lessing.

adventured 15d ago
Actual supply hasn't done anything consequential. Extreme increases in generation + publishing are not occurring in a way that impacts the typical user. The typical TikTok user is not seeing a 10x or 100x increase in published tiktoks from the people they follow. The same goes for YouTube. Absolutely nothing of consequence has shifted, at all. The typical Spotify user is not seeing a flood of quality music that they have to sift through. There is no actual curation problem. The AI garbage is overwhelmingly and easily being ignored by the masses. They're just shrugging and going back to listening to their favorite music, or back to listening to their favorite podcasts, and so on. The premise of supply to infinity is nothing more than an empty (and now aged) talking point that has turned out to be false. It'll be trivial to find the next Hendrix, easier than ever in fact. AI sucks at making interesting music (short'ish term problem), and it can't play an instrument live to save its life (substantial problem). Fans want to see Taylor Swift live more than they want to listen to her mp3s or discs by a radical margin. They want to watch Swift perform on YouTube videos, or at the Grammy's, they want to watch her in interviews. They're fans. AI can't stand on stage and do jack squat, it has zero charisma, zero stage presence. Nobody cares about AI.

b0rtb0rt 15d ago

metal gear solid 2 predicted all of this 25 years ago

bluefirebrand 15d ago
And Kojima's predictions in MGS2 were based on writings by Richard Dawkins in the 70s

eviks 15d ago

> a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. Indeed, so there is no limit on how much of supply can simply be ignored, so 100x every year doesn't need to push anything off the rails. And in reality there is no 0 cost, the marginal cost isn't about pushing bits in the wires

huurtehoog 15d ago

"[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." Herbert A. Simon Simon is a fantastic author that everyone alive today would to well to read. He gets misrepresented by Karp in his manifesto: "He envisioned that by the 1980s humans would be essentially relegated to kinetic tasks, confined for the most part to labor that required movement in the physical world." Hm, doesn't sound like Simon. Let's see Karp's notes on that source: "He envisioned that: See Simon, New Science of Management Decision, 38 (arguing that “men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery”)." Ok. Seems to support Karp's interpretation. But let's follow Karp's recommendation than and see the source: "I have done some armchair analysis of what this proposition means for predictions of the occupational profile twenty years hence. I do not have time to report this analysis in detail here, but I can summarize my conclusions briefly. Technologically, as I have argued earlier, machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Economically, men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough—some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery (e.g., operating earth-moving equipment), some kinds of non programmed problem solving, and some kinds of service activities where face-to-face human interaction is of the essence. Man will be somewhat less involved in performing the day-to-day work of the organization, and somewhat more involved in maintaining the system that performs the work." A much more nuanced and qualified take. Published in 1977, I would say that in may ways work and organizations in developed economies largely evolved like he foresaw given how the service sector came to dominate the economy and so much human effort now goes into software development, configuration and supervision instead of pushing paper with their hands into and from drawers as it was done in the 1970s.