Thoughts
I read an HN comment a while back, probably years ago, about how human productivity could continue increasing exponentially infinitely if we
allowed for digital / virtual productivity gains. And at the time I wrote this off as a sci-fi hypothetical, if interesting philosophically. But I've recently realized that video games are exactly that. There's a non-zero amount of serious engineering work that goes into optimizing flying machines in Minecraft to get diamonds. And unlike other forms of entertainment, (including all historical forms of entertainment), diamonds in Minecraft are a completely artificially scarce resource. So even if we run out of diamonds to mine in the real world, we could continue to mine diamonds in Minecraft at an exponentially increasing rate.