Are you sure?
The earth has finite resources. Wealth is a zero sum game. Even if you want to look at things like entertainment that can be reporduced cheaply, musicians and directors need fed, food is limited, therefore even films/music are limited.
The earth has finite resources. Wealth is a zero sum game. Even if you want to look at things like entertainment that can be reporduced cheaply, musicians and directors need fed, food is limited, therefore even films/music are limited.
That's clearly not the case. The classic example is building a house alone in the woods, but let's consider art. With different choices, a person could use the same paint to make a good or a bad painting. The choices made while painting decide if it will be a mess or something beautiful. Even if it's never shown or sold to anyone else, the person who made a beautiful painting would be wealthier for it.
Much of what's seen as wealth production is instead liquidity production -- turning natural capital into financial currency. In the case of any production chain founded on fossil-fuel energy, the transformation requires a draw-down of natural capital worth many millions of times the market-price and wealth "created".
Activities founded on renewable or sustainable processes are less fraught, but there's still the accounting for potential disruption or reduction: soil loss (rougly 100x the rate of creation), sink-exhaustion (waste and pollution factors), biodiversity loss (rates of extinction > speciation), and the like.
There's little accounting for any of this within conventional economic theory. Ecological, biophysical, and thermoeconomics address parts. Steve Keen is starting to write mathematical descriptions of production factors in which the role of energy is taken into account.
What happened in the meantime? We live in the most abundant age in history. Worldwide poverty is at an all-time low. Surely wealth is growing in absolute terms and it's not just the top 1% benefiting.
Given various inefficiencies of educational institutions, this is all but certain to be occurring as we speak. There is a notion of a "forgetting curve".
And, as you note, information can at best asymptotically achieve some maximum theoretical efficiency. It's not a limitless fount of potential.