It seems you've taken a roundabout way to arrive at innovation.
It's interesting because this is something that makes programming feel like a "bullshit job" to some: I'm not creating anything, I'm just assembling libraries/tools/framework. It certainly doesn't feel as rewarding, though the economic consensus (based on the salaries we get) is that value most definitely is being generated. But you could say the same of lumberjacks, potters, even the person doing QA on an assembly line, all in all it's not very innovative.
That's the thing with innovation though, once you've done it, it's done. We don't need to write assembly to make games, thanks to the sequential innovation of game engines (and everything they are built on).
Samme with LLMs and Bitcoin: now that they exist, we can (and did) build up on them. But that'll never make a whole new paradigm, at least not rapidly.
I think our economic system simply doesn't give the vast majority of people the chance to innovate. All the examples you've given (and others I can think of) represented big risks (usually in time invested) for big rewards. Give people UBI (or decent social safety nets) and you'll find that many more people can afford to innovate, some of which will do so in CS.
I have to go back to work now, some libraries need stitched together.
It's interesting because this is something that makes programming feel like a "bullshit job" to some: I'm not creating anything, I'm just assembling libraries/tools/framework. It certainly doesn't feel as rewarding, though the economic consensus (based on the salaries we get) is that value most definitely is being generated. But you could say the same of lumberjacks, potters, even the person doing QA on an assembly line, all in all it's not very innovative.
That's the thing with innovation though, once you've done it, it's done. We don't need to write assembly to make games, thanks to the sequential innovation of game engines (and everything they are built on).
Samme with LLMs and Bitcoin: now that they exist, we can (and did) build up on them. But that'll never make a whole new paradigm, at least not rapidly.
I think our economic system simply doesn't give the vast majority of people the chance to innovate. All the examples you've given (and others I can think of) represented big risks (usually in time invested) for big rewards. Give people UBI (or decent social safety nets) and you'll find that many more people can afford to innovate, some of which will do so in CS.
I have to go back to work now, some libraries need stitched together.