Comment by gwern

A subtext here may be his current AI work. In OP, Carmack is arguing, essentially, that 'software is slow because good smart devs are expensive and we don't want to pay for them to optimize code and systems end-to-end as there are bigger fish to fry'. So, an implication here is that if good smart devs suddenly got very cheap, then you might see a lot of software suddenly get very fast, as everyone might choose to purchase them and spend them on optimization. And why might good smart devs become suddenly available for cheap?