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I do think AI has made programmers more productive, and that it is about to make them much more productive to the point where they might be essentially project managers.
What remains to be seen is what economic benefit that will have. For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.
As the economy becomes more digital, it becomes a lot harder to quantify gains in GDP. In 1987, Legend of Zelda might have cost $50. Today, for almost the same price, you can buy a Zelda game with far better graphics and a much longer story line. But does the consumer today get more enjoyment from 2025 Zelda that from 1985 Zelda? I don't think so. The hedonic treadmill is real.
Similarly, does the economy grow from making TikTok 20% more addictive. Does it grow from adding AI-generated thots to Instagram? Or from making AI girlfriends? A lot of the stuff that happens in software, maybe even most of it, is just not that important or even counterproductive.
Somewhat related...
The dream of reducing drudgery by offloading it to AI might fall flat too. AI will make it possible for a human lawyer to easily glean information from a 1000 page document. But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.
I can’t imagine that with the current pace of development at cheap conversational LLMs, soon we won’t start seeing RPGs that are truly open world with actually intelligent NPCs or strategy games where the AI controlled opponents are truly strategising and conspiring etc.
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Video games are (mostly) saturated, although I think that AI can reduce the amount of manpower required to make a AAA game and therefore encourage experimentation and proliferation in ways we haven't seen since the 2000s.
More importantly, though, there are huge realms of software development that are mostly untouched because they're tedious and uninteresting to skilled, highly-paid software engineers. I think that AI-driven software development could vastly improve the quality and user experience for 99% of the software that ordinary people (not tech bros) use.
Anecdotally, I'm making good progress on some personal software projects now I don't have to write all the tedious bits after work.
I won't consider video games saturated until developers can create faster than "content locusts" want to consume. Currently games that provide a lot of playtime relative to developer time still have significant gaps between major deployments. Path of Exile for example had approximately three minor and one major release per year. Given that most players play 1-2 weeks after a release this produces 4-8 weeks of player time per year of development time. If you're into a more niche genre you might be looking at one or two good titles per decade.
Some people might argue that we already quietly hit this point well before the current AI craze. The struggles of the modern gaming industry and the indie scene are partly because it's (perceived as) hard to peel chronic Minecraft/Fortnite/COD/etc. players away from their comfort games.
That might be what people say but the real issue is that the games are mediocre trash. As soon as anything decent actually is released people flock to that game.
All this is (almost) only cope for bad developers.
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Even if you're in a major genre like RPGs you might still only get a good game once every couple of years. That there is a sea of uninspired and boring shit out there doesn't really matter.
The only parts of the market that really are closing in on being saturated are the ones where the playtime is essentially infinite, like competitive multiplayer games.
What is happening is perhaps comparable to the book market. Does there being practically no barrier to entry mean that the market is saturated? No, it means the market for mediocre slop is saturated, which is of so low quality that the vast majority of prospective consumers have negative interest in it, or only use it as a sort of background noise to fill time. Some might even argue that there are less worthwhile books to read despite there being more words written than ever before.
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Bingo.
I am slightly hopeful that 3D printing (and I guess 3D printing + AI) will get us to some good places in the tangible meatspace. I also suspect that, if Space Economy becomes real, there might be a lot of possibilities for material improvement (some of which might be tied to white collar type jobs, like Martian Rock Rover Supervisor).
Yes, and this is a horrible thought. I would be quite happy with a law banning contracts that cannot be meaningfully understood in 5 minutes. That's not a law banning even per se 100,000 pages of dense legalese but I should be able to read a contract in one sitting with no surprises. Same with a law.
(Lawyers will love this once they realize it means litigating over whether the fine print was adequately represented by the topline!)
This ties into an axiom of my political views. Give or take:
(Which then feeds forward into constitutions, hierarchical laws, kitchen-sink bills, etc, etc.)
Aha. I love this.
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