[ Thanks to Dave Guard for this
link. ]
“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…”