Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits.
I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht?
Edit:---------
I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.
Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that.
We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
This has been debunked many times. The source is misleading to the point of being deceptive, it is pushing a narrative. Per the US government, the median household has $1000 per month leftover after all ordinary expenses. A very detailed breakdown of this for each income decile is available from the BLS.
You can’t square “most Americans can’t afford a $1000 emergency expense” with “median Americans can afford to light $1000 on fire each month without impacting their standard of living”.
And it would be news to million struggling to pay the bills and rent (and not because they buy expensive lattes or new iPhones) that then can "afford to light $1000 every month without impacting their standard of living".
Especially for people whose standard of living is already working their ass off, perhaps in two jobs, and still scrapping to make it and not even thinking of affording to sent their kids to school, or can't even dream of ever being able to survive a need to stay off work for a month for medical reasons...
We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or falling into lifestyles of despair.
Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get low-income housing built because of NIMBY.
IF we make it through...
We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable resources each year in order to maintain our current lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.
Let's turn things around:
- under what circumstances should a person be allowed to use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the earth receives each day?
- under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?
Obviously the target number of starving children is zero. But the reality is that we are not going to get that number to zero overnight. It takes incremental steps.
In my niche(s), I still see new Youtubers pop up all the time that gain large followings and turn Youtube into a full-time job. Sure, they don't all become rich, but many have started earning enough to drive Teslas, so it's definitely not pennies.
Software development, as an employment opportunity, does not have these same dynamics.
But you’re right, the more level the playing field, the greater the competition.