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From my perspective, the superfarms are the things that we get when we try to predict the future by just pushing the present forward, but without thinking about newly emergent industries, societal shifts, and so on. So in other words, just seeing the same stuff as the present, but bigger, better, and more efficient.

So an obvious example there would be software. It's certainly true (if we assume LLMs reach their 'potential') that software will be able to reach new heights, and with a far smaller headcount driving the development. So some people see this as economically catastrophic for software developers, or an economic boon for certain large software companies.

But I think that when software can be built at the drop of a hat, software itself will no eventually no longer really matter in economic terms. Yet things you can build on top of it will matter more than ever. Those things are difficult to see from here, but I expect they will be the giants of the economy of tomorrow.

by anon848736286 hours ago|

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Many goods/products have seen a transition from scarcity to abundance. The analogy of fiber looms was already made. Humans used to spend a huge amount of time producing clothe. It was even used as currency in many cultures. No cheap clothing is so abundant we don't even think about where it comes from.

Salt is another one. Used to be payment for Roman soldier, now you can just take it from a McDonalds if you want.

Seems like we can have an abundance of software.

by treespace87 hours ago|

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But what have we built on top of software so far? My first thought is that we have made new communities. But most of them are of much poorer quality than what we had in person.

I hope we start to rebuild in person connections again with this technology.

by anon848736286 hours ago|

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Well it has certainly transformed bureaucratic operations. And I don't mean that in a bad way; superior bureaucracy and logistics was a key to the British Empire.

Software allows us to push computation (intelligence) into our environment.

by XorNot6 hours ago|

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Telecommunications did that, not really software. Twitter started out as an SMS compatible service remember.

I do think there's something there though: I've spent the last 2 days building an app I've always wanted to build for myself with my computer in the corner running Claude and Claude Remote. Prototypes land on my phone and I don't even look at it for more then a few minutes before doing something else.

It's software, actually useful software, which doesn't take 100s of hours to build.

So I didn't even really spend two days on it: I mostly didn't look at all. I'll spend more time setting the result up on my home server.

by visarga7 hours ago|

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I agree we can't predict, and I explain it this way - it is like a football game, where the ball will be 10 seconds later depends on what every player is doing. It is the same with AI, what we will do with it depends on what others will do with it, the reason we can't foresee it.