"Material products are getting 'smarter' in that more and more of the value of a material product is contained in the information it carries, rather than in its material substance. R. Buckminster Fuller called this process 'ephemeralization,' and it is one means by which the economics of matter--predicated on the conservations of mass and number--are becoming sidelined by the properties of information. Furthermore, both the capital and marginal cost of making products has trended consistently and rapidly down as manufacturing tools become both cheaper and more versatile, so that the capital cost of an object is increasingly not in the capital equipment required to manufacture it, but in the effort required to design it..."
