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As long as this is the paradigm for creating wealth, as it has been for several decades now, the only major question we need to ask about an investment is: what is the marginal value?

In the coming era of expensive energy, it will make sense only to fund those software projects that keep the overall IT investment at a reasonably small portion of revenues while producing a maximal effect on the ability to deliver hard goods and services.

Here’s a surprise: the human brain consumes 20% or more of the calories of a typical person.  There is evidence that for brain-intensive work, it goes even higher. When you realize that just three or four calories can produce a giant flame (skip to 2:40) we are talking serious energy behind every thought you think.  In fact, dealing with the heat load from the brain was a major bottleneck in human evolution. Let me state this a different way.  Nature has decided that for every human that the planet supports, at least twenty percent of the food energy we can scrape together is going to go to information processing — planning, remembering, analyzing, communicating — rather than actually doing stuff.  And this is before we spend a dime on technology, not to mention consultants and other brain workers whose bodies aren’t used that much.

But information is still special, and it has special limits that anyone who thinks and/or programs for a living should pay attention to in the context of the coming energy shortages.

o the extent that we can call something information, and take advantage of this wonderful copy-the-pattern-for-”free” property, it has value only if is ABOUT something that, ultimately, isn’t information.

It seems this all leads to a constraint: the total value of information in an economy is always less than the value of the non-information, i.e. the traditional goods and services.  This is because the value of information is a derivative of the “real stuff” it is about.

Now what I’m saying is if we don’t start helping our clients find huge efficiencies, if we don’t tackle the world’s toughest problems with everything good software can offer, in short, if we don’t stop working on boring crap, than many of us will be out of a job.