To be charitable to TFA, there are a dearth of accurate and well-understood labels for the kind of X versus Y they want to make between national economies.

Even "First/Third world" has been fraying at the edges for decades since it was originally about political alignment.

For that matter, a lot of human civilization has been about identifying things that were normal and making them rare. "Normal" infant mortality of 40%, famines, floods, history being lost, etc.

Anyway, when it comes to "this is normal" I think we should take care to distinguish between interpretations of:

1. "This specific case should not have taken certain people by surprise."

2. "This is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon."

3. "This is natural and therefore cannot or should not be solved." [Naturalistic fallacy.]

I think I might enjoy it for a little bit and then become very depressed at the idea that it will never end, a future of fixing things that should never have been broken in the first place and which won't stay fixed.

> If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them.

Sometimes they're available, but not palatable, when the opportunity could threaten their existing comfortable way of doing things. Either by "self-cannibalism" or by changing the ecology so that the main product isn't so profitable.

Then the opportunities are ignored, or actively worked-against via lobbying, embrace-extend-extinguish, etc.

I try to tag the line-by-line comments with little labels like [Unimportant] or [Style] so that someone going through them has an idea of their (un)importance without reading the whole thing.

TLDR: Instead of deciding to build the right thing everyone is trying to clean up after making the wrong thing very quickly.

Remember this, when you hear: "Some mysterious and shadowy cabal of ideologues in higher-education are using unspecified means to brainwash a generation scientists into not liking the Republican party!"

No, the party has been earning that bad reputation. To use The Emperor's New Math, it's fallen by "600%" or more.

P.S.: Even if you honestly want the US federal government to just not-have science funding or fund different kinds of work... this is the stupid/wasteful/corrupt way to do it.

I think some of it has to do with incentives. Nobody wants to invest in a team to adapt and test other-field lessons that may come out as "there's no free lunch" or "this is equivalent to a hard problem they didn't solve there yet either."

So instead we're more likely to see navel-gazing "singularity" stories that fit with telling your investors they will become fantastically rich.

We also need to talk more about the third not-mutually-exclusive option: Legal liability if/when things go wrong.

It's often buried because the people making money dislike it, so much so that they will lobby the government to impose wide bans. Especially if:

* The ban makes somebody else pay most of the costs of protecting "the children" against their design-choices or business-model.

* The ban gives them a blanket pass for almost any exploitative design against adults or other acceptable targets.