I agree with your points, but software will enable revolutionary devices. I think my dream robot butler that will clean my house, iron my clothes, prepare food based on grand chef recipes, take deliveries and repaint the walls while I am not around is just around the corner. This is mostly a software problem. In the military space software is what is making the difference in ukraine: drones, self guided missiles, intelligence. Then you have self driving cars.
As an office worker, I’d stay what is capping productivity right now is actually not good enough software. Too many manual processes done by hand, copy-pasting in excel. It is still too slow and expensive to develop software to do automation and those things are still too damn complex for business users to automate it themselves.
But in that space the gains of productivity have been massive. MS Outlook has eliminated the job of a secretary. Remember the armies of accountants computing financial reports. By cleaning up an old room on a trading floor I found a stack of blank paper trade tickets (printed in 1999…), you’d have a guy running between sales and traders and ops to get it signed off. Then ops people typing it. I read a book of a guy in the French secret service saying that his career consisted in compiling information about what paper people wrote, who knows who, and to know your way around that file so you could search it efficiently. This guy has been replaced by google and linkedin. The hours saved finding information immediately, saving you a trip to the library are countless. I think software has enabled huge productivity gains and there are more to come.
As an office worker, I’d stay what is capping productivity right now is actually not good enough software. Too many manual processes done by hand, copy-pasting in excel. It is still too slow and expensive to develop software to do automation and those things are still too damn complex for business users to automate it themselves.
But in that space the gains of productivity have been massive. MS Outlook has eliminated the job of a secretary. Remember the armies of accountants computing financial reports. By cleaning up an old room on a trading floor I found a stack of blank paper trade tickets (printed in 1999…), you’d have a guy running between sales and traders and ops to get it signed off. Then ops people typing it. I read a book of a guy in the French secret service saying that his career consisted in compiling information about what paper people wrote, who knows who, and to know your way around that file so you could search it efficiently. This guy has been replaced by google and linkedin. The hours saved finding information immediately, saving you a trip to the library are countless. I think software has enabled huge productivity gains and there are more to come.