Nadine,
Couple things come to mind:
1) physical goods - I think the current world economy has come close to optimize the production process. The world clearly has the ability to provide all people of the world with sufficient physical goods. For example, if we suspend all future innovations and concentrate on producing and distributing the current innovations to people of the world, we can easily achieve that in a couple years.
2) digital goods - the beauty of digital goods is that there's minimal effort to massively reproduce, therefore, digital good is about innovations as successful innovation can be distributed at almost zero cost.
3) PE is a physical concept, it is aimed to quantify the potential of physical innovations. The slow but steady rise of PE reflects the fact that physical innovation takes time to reproduce and phase out.
4) PE is not an applicable concept to quantify the potential of digital innovations, at least not the linear model that we've got used to.
5) I think in the future, a better indicator will be used to measure potentials of digital innovations. I suspect the concept will be similar to how we measure powers such as radiation, sound energy, earthquake, etc.
6) the future is going to be like George Orwell's 1984: when Eurasia goes to war with Oceania, all records have to be modified to reflect the new alliance. likewise, in the future, a successfully released product will completely replace many of our computing infrastructures with a moment of notice.
7) electricity defeated the sun, automobile defeated gravity, radio defeated paper, nuclear power defeated man, television defeated the mind, electronics defeated physical objects, PC defeated space, the Internet is going to defeat time.
8) for us small time traders, the best bet against the future is to make enough to secure a nice condo in the city and vacation house by the sea 30 minutes away from the ski area.
9) the best way to prevent all these from happening is to encourage space exploration, we man kind has outgrown this small planet. blowing up the world is within reach of many small start ups.
well, happy investing. |
