Wouldnt productivity have two knobs? Efficiency and energy/effort input?
Also efficiency sometimes goes against "right"? If you need resiliancy you then "right" migh include redundancy. In software, that could also be guardrails like memory safety that necissarily take some extra abstraction to implement and a processing penalty?
Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.
They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.
For a while, I thought their end-game was simply to get "too big to fail" before the bubble burst and get that bailout. But you are right - they either overshot or have some other idea in mind because now they are too big to bailout.
Hopefully they get access back and someone learns enough to at least apend a few grand on some cold storage tapes.
Heck its pbs. They should have publically archived it so anyone could keep a copy. At least the old stuff.
That sounds like the vast majority of "app" developers.
These things are a casino market.
You are conflating micropayments (sufficient to pay creators) with gateway monetization, which would need to be small enough you could still use the internet (lets say thousands of pages a month) but high eough to dissuade scraper bot operators. I am not sure such a price exists. Maybe for some bot operators, but the various AI companies have more money than all regular internet users.
In other words - car usage expands to the limit because human nature is to use the resource until it gets inconvenient. The gas expands to fill the container.
Overlay networks are also feasable.
The term was useful back when we used coal gas. It stopped being useful 100 years ago.
Not going to disagree, but "web usage" is basically everything. You can literally run an entire desktop operating system from 2007 on a virtual machine emulated in JavaScript in your browser now.
It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.