A civilization that has cured all diseases, surpassed energy constraints, and reached material abundance is not debugging package version conflicts or fighting database indexing problems.
Imagine if labs stopped working on improving language models today, and we suddenly got left with only the open models we have now, and from now on effort would be put entirely into reducing inference computation cost.
The intelligence level we currently have is more than enough for us to improve the current software systems running almost all of the really important things in the world in such a dramatic way, that a downstream civilizational tech level up in the coming decades is almost inevitable.
Then as we improve the software world in coming years, it will free resources for us to start improving the physical world faster again, which should be our real goal, as it is what really matters.
one of the gifts of a career in engineering is realizing just how difficult the world we have was to achieve and the totality of effort required to maintain it.
The colors of our atmosphere seen from space! Multiple vibrant layers of green atomic oxygen, orange hydroxyl radicals, and red airglow excited from solar activity.