Robots, unfortunately, move capital from labor to owners.
I'm not proposing robots are bad. You're kinda screwed once they're out in the wild, if you don't adopt them you can't stay in business eventually (without some sort of pivot to a niche market segment).
Areas where there is automation but prices continue to go up have issues with competition - banks are a great example because banking licenses are impossible to acquire.
I would even add in for automation for cars or heavy manufacturing: they increase the cost of getting into the game: thus driving down competition as well.
The automation started in the late 70s at least tho. The other child comment about banks and lack of competition I think really hits this on the head.
How can automation add value instead of capturing existing value through better efficiency?
I once heard this example using coffee beans. If you buy coffee beans, and you have to brew it, that's a commodity. When you go to a coffee shop, and the server brews it for you and brings it to you, that's a service. When you have one of those single-server instant coffee that you pop into the machine, and it brews it for you, that's a product.
The distance between you and the original commodity can be defined as the number of transformations from the coffee plant to your cup. Raw beans that you have to process yourself is closer to the original plant. A service provider inserts themselves into that process of brewing a coffee, and charge you for it. Productizing it so you don't even have to wait on someone else to do it for you inserts additional steps -- packaging, technology, etc.
We call this "value-added", meaning that some merchant captures the value from transformational steps that you would have otherwise have to do yourself.
However, I am talking about "value-adding". The key difference here is that the transformation changes the commodity in a way that contributes something beyond what you could have done yourself, not simply capturing existing value in the value chain.
I think most use of technology and automation are attempting to capture existing value rather than creating value that was not there before.
Network effect of the internet might be value-adding, but we have also seen the same network-effect used to aggregate and capture large swaths of the market without contributing anything back (Facebook, for example). Is the network effect of Amazon's logistics prowess value-adding? And if it is, what unintended consequences have we seen from it?
It may also be that, for computing, we would have to look at older generations of our software and look for the forks not taken. As an example, Apple's Hypercard enabled individuals to create their own computing experience, something that could not have been done before without it and other systems like it ... and it was deliberately dropped so that all design came from Apple (iPhones, iPads, etc.). By the metric of return on shareholder value, that decision was wildly successful. But in terms of adding value for our civilization, was it?
AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero demonstrated that humans can no longer beat AI Go players. If you are willing to spend energy to power all those TPUs, they can play far beyond the best human players.
That shook up a lot of the pros. Some of the top players have quit. However, other players got more excited. They saw Go being played in ways they had never seen before. People who made their living tutoring Go to other people have lost their livelihood. On the other hand, Isee discussion at the high amateur ranks now uses Leela Zero, or Katago to learn and explore the game. That's a positive contribution that could not be done before. (And the shadowside: it is easier for people to cheat; though if you are using Go to develop your own intellectual ability to evaluate and make decisions, using an AI to play competitively is kinda cheating yourself).
The difference between today's computing culture and the "road not taken" you described is like the difference between a scribal culture and a literate culture. I really hope the ship hasn't sailed.
I am not sure if that is a good analogy. Maybe it is.
By the “road not taken” though, I mean something that is more difficult to pull off, and it does not monetize well, if ever. I am thinking, for example, Christopher Alexander’s work on pattern languages. That is, designing a pattern language in such a way that the end users can always create the right thing for themselves. Something like the ideas behind Smalltalk, where you don’t need a computer science degree to customize. Instead, it got turned into OOP Gang of Four. A smaller artisan class of software engineers and product managers to determine what the best design for the end user. Add A/B testing, growth hacks, dark patterns, and customer validation, we have the engine of growth for startups to return multiples for investors.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s where the magical experience of computing had a lot yo do with creating those environments.
Now, flip side. I have also read a history of MMOs that, the author concludes that the all time most successful MMO is Roblox. Players make games for each other, and there are some revenue sharing. There is a pattern language in the design, but otherwise, there is a great deal of freedom to make stuff. It still netted a good return for shareholders.
So maybe that ship has not sailed yet.
But to come back to that question I posed: is Roblox value-adding? If so, what is it contributing that could not have been done without it?