Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin of SK Ventures wrote an interesting and important essay titled Society’s Technical Debt and Software’s Gutenberg Moment.
The abstract follows. I encourage you to read the full essay.
There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. And there is also deserved concern about such technologies’ material impact on jobs. But observers are missing two very important things:
- Every wave of technological innovation has been unleashed by something costly becoming cheap enough to waste.
- Software production has been too complex and expensive for too long, which has caused us to underproduce software for decades, resulting in immense, society-wide technical debt.
This technical debt is about to contract in a dramatic, economy-wide fashion as the cost and complexity of software production collapses, releasing a wave of innovation.