Hardware and Software

Jakub Growiec

Chapter Chapter 4 in Accelerating Economic Growth, 2022, pp 45-62 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The humankind pursues local control maximization by performing premeditated actions, the sum of which sets the course of development of the human civilization. The macroeconomic way of looking at it assumes an aggregate production function, describing how inputs are transformed into aggregate output. This chapter introduces the hardware–software framework, which assumes that producing output requires (i) physical action and (ii) code, a set of instructions describing the action. Physical action is performed by hardware while the code is provided by the software. Hardware and software are mutually complementary and each of them is essential for production. The chapter proceeds to characterize hardware and software inputs used across human history and offers a typology of final outputs. It elucidates how the accumulation of hardware and software inputs and their cumulative technological improvements propelled accelerating economic growth over the millennia, and how artificial intelligence may carry this process into the future.

Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:frochp:978-3-031-07195-9_4

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-07195-9_4

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