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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

I get tired of people talking about how the US doesn't "make anything". I spent my adult life creating software that was super valuable. Along the way I worked with a bunch of people (from all over the world) who-- because of their brains and their education-- could have made almost anything very well. They didn't make steel or automobiles because that wasn't where their skills were best deployed.

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I'm not convinced that software is really intrinsically valuable. We write it to help us make and deliver things that are actually valuable, which are physical goods. The whole service sector would be nothing without the physical. Finance doesn't exist just to see numbers changing on a screen. It's there so we can buy food after we retire etc.

Maybe games are truly software that isn't tied to anything physical. I can't think of much else, though. Can you?

At work, we provide video courses of therapists to other mental health professionals.

I help run a youth group, which uses lots of software to manage, communicate, learn and empower the next generation.

Nothing physical, but there is no question in my mind that all this software is intrinsically valuable.

If it were intrinsically valuable then it would still be valuable if you took away the businesses. Would your healthcare software be valuable if there was nobody to produce the video course? Would your youth group be valuable if nobody attended it? What are you empowering the youth to do? Also write software to empower the next generation? It has to end somewhere.

You can't eat software. You can't eat gold either, but if society collapsed I bet you'd still be able to trade a gold ingot for a carrot, because it maintains a modicum of value. I doubt you'd have many takers for a JPEG codec you just wrote, though, and that's far more generally useful software than business software which is what most software is.

So the whole idea of "you can't eat technology" relies on the apocalypse happening imminently? Modern institutions of society are WHY our lives are full of what would be magic 200 years ago, like being able to grab a carrot from the supermarket shelf any time. With both hardware and software we've made agriculture the most efficient its ever been, and it's now so efficient it literally frees up to optimize the edges of other problems

Software is tidbits of automation. It is intrinsically valuable because it lowers the cost of some process. (This is obviously assuming it's a process you care about. If you automate a worthless process then of course its components will be worthless too)

Also, the steel mills and automobile factories are powered by software (along with the raw materials and manual labor).

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