Imagine each of those people is an employee at the same company, and they each command a salary of say 100k. How much more productive do you need to make them for it to become worth it? If you 3x their productivity, they are now doing the job of 3 people, you just saved 200k _per year_.
To tie that back to your comment -- imagine its for a team of 40 users but the company would ideally like them to be a team of 400 users. Yet because of the software being created, those 40 people are doing the work of 400.
You can extend that line of thinking pretty far -- and going down that line of thought is when I realized how valuable programming is. When you build the right things you are literally creating value with everything you ship, and it adds up over time.
Definitely. A cheap computer can outperform a billion humans at certain types of tasks. One must merely find the right tasks for the computer in order to exact unfathomable value. AI is going to expand the problem domains that computers can compete in by several orders of magnitude. The era of SPUs (Single Person Unicorn) companies is near.
To tie that back to your comment -- imagine its for a team of 40 users but the company would ideally like them to be a team of 400 users. Yet because of the software being created, those 40 people are doing the work of 400.
You can extend that line of thinking pretty far -- and going down that line of thought is when I realized how valuable programming is. When you build the right things you are literally creating value with everything you ship, and it adds up over time.