The Only Three Products in the Universe
Information, matter, and energy
What is the total addressable market for bits, and atoms?
Bits: Anything that changes a brain
Atoms: Anything that transports matter, or energy
Here's the socio-physics underlying any economic activity, because there's really just three kinds of products:
Information, Matter, and Energy
The nature of any software business is in the processing and dissemination of information. The part of the world software can eat is any part that does just that - bit flipping and sending. Before code, this was done through thinking, and language.
Rather than 'products made with programming' I would re-conceptualize the total potential 'Software Industry' to mean use this information definition - anything where the value delivered is of the nature of information transformation or coordination.
Democracy, theaters, libraries, education, record-keeping, entertainment, conferences, bureaucracies, the bulletin board at the community center - the net result of all these things is to create changes in the neural network inside someones head.
If you want to find an area of economic activity software can eventually eat, its really simple - if it's something that involves people thinking, or using language, currently, then it's liable to be eaten by software.
Since any social activity consists primarily of thinking and language, its liable to disrupted by intelligent-enough software. This is fundamentally why AI will affect every single facet of the social world (to figure out how it changes is why I started @TheAISalonSF)
A too-dumb question no one is asking is this: Why is information valuable?
Matter and Energy are the Primary Products
The only reason information is valuable is because we need matter and energy to survive, and the usefulness of different forms of matter and energy are highly variable across our spatial and temporal landscapes.
If you are bacteria living in a constantly replenishing nutrient soup, zero information is valuable to you. You can reproduce by yourself, waste is removed, nutrients are brought forth. Single celled organisms developed sensing and locomotive abilities to swim in a gradient of variable matter-energy usefulness.
The reason animals have a nervous system is to help coordinate sensing and locomotion as the value-landscape of matter and energy get more and more complicated.
Consciousness is an emergent property when the matter-energy value landscape becomes so complicated, you need to reliably model the actions of other actors and anticipate their moves. The theory of the 'other', in social contexts, is what drives evolution of the sense of the self.
Human nature, which drives our needs for relationships, entertainment, and everything else - is whatever protocol optimized our matter-energy landscape navigation skills. It turns out, since we have shitty claws and small teeth, we need to live in herds. Thus, society.
The end-point of value-delivery for any economic activity has its origins in the provision of matter and energy.
'Encoding information as energy in a matter substrate' is a general enough statement to apply to either sound waves, which are pressure-variations in a fluid medium, as well as to charge-states of capacitors in a memory element. The 'information age' is the recognizance that the minimum matter-energy cost of providing information services is in an electronic format, rather than spoken and written words.
We can replicate and transmit a voltage or charge-state millions to billions of times faster, and more cheaply, than spoken or written words. Electrical signals are the most natural format for information - there was a hint this was the case, because thats how our bodies work.
Evolution is great because its provided billions of years to explore the possible configuration space of landscape-navigating body plans, social protocols, and mechanisms of action in this complicated mess of information, matter, and energy.
Whats the most natural format for manipulating matter and energy?
Look again to evolved living systems, how do they work? Living systems essentially operate as self-assembling, self-replicating and healing nanobot factories.
DNA/RNA computing elements with protein nanobots using enzyme-catalyzed reactions to digest mixed-up matter and construct and assemble it in-situ, molecule by molecule. There’s no “bone factory” that makes bone-blocks and ships them to assembly locations. You just circulate raw material inputs everywhere, and molecular nanobots assemble them in-place.
Compare this to how we build stuff - dig up the mix of material, then painstakingly extract and purify it, drive it through unfavorable thermodynamic reactions by adding tons of energy into new composite materials, alloys, and substances. By comparison to living systems, this is a hugely inefficient and high-entropy process.
This is why I agree with Jensen Huang - for whatever the current revolution there is in AI, the far larger revolution will be in our mastering synthetic biology.
The dramatic impact of our mastery over the world of matter and energy via the language of self-assembling nanobots - biology - will be far larger than AI, simply because matter-energy products are the final end-point of economic value generation.
And in the mean-time, the most valuable application of information tools will be, as they always have been (and is their nature), the leverage they provide over manipulating an environment of matter and energy.
From Atoms, we get Bits. And from Bits, we will master Atoms - this will the highest value generation moment in our history as a species...
"And in Truth, only Atoms and the Void," Democritus of Abdura (3rd century BCE) .