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That's just an incredibly jaded way to look at things. The solution is developed by people who specialize in developing solutions. The communication of the existence of the solution to people who need it is handled by people who specialize in communication and customer outreach, i.e. sales.
You may think that without a sales team the solution would be cheaper; the reality is that without a sales team the solution would either not exist or be substantially less refined as _someone_ has to handle the customer interactions, and if that's the dev than that's taking them away from working on the product.
We view a business as problematic when it's only inserting itself between you and the solution, without actually creating the solution, i.e. rent-seeking. So, it's the relationship between the business and the solution that causes an issue, not the action of putting the business between the solution and the problem. The latter is a given, always.
> Good businesses create a solution to your problem and then "insert themselves" between you and that solution.
I cannot wrap my head around this framing at all. Businesses that provide a solution aren't inserting themselves between anything. They're offering a solution directly.
In biology you'd call that a cancer; in predator-prey dynamics it's the thing that happens at breakneck speed before the inevitable crash. It's so dumb. But talk about degrowth or alternative economic models and you've suddenly conversationally untouchable.
Sustainability is a behavior only learned when absolutely necessary, when the constraints of material existence impose themselves on the living. Growth will always happen outside of these constraints.
That is to say, some behaviors will reduce growth now in exchange for stability (i.e. more growth later, or less growth loss later), but those are hard-won and they are not the default. The default is always growth up to capacity, and we don't actually know what that capacity is.
Malthusians have been dooming for centuries. We can accept that at some future point, they might be right, but it is always wrong to assume they are inevitably correct at the present moment. Growth can and will be pursued until it is no longer an option. It's not weird, it's not a fixation, it's not a hypnosis. It's just life.
That's how bad businesses work. Good businesses provide a solution to a real problem, instead.
Now both of those numbers are finite and we could try to figure out how many numbers we could "describe" such as tree(3), but that would be limited by the number of symbols (i.e numbers, operators, letters and words) that could be used (i.e we would have less than a googolplex different numbers that could be represented using maths, language and thought). That's still going to be a finite number.
Cartographers in the 18th centuries were "basically done" mapping out the Earth. In the 20th century we were able to use satellite imagery to get the "full picture". Does that mean we have perfect knowledge of the Earth? Absolutely not. There is never a final frontier of knowledge.
Or as ironing out the wrinkles on a great big t-shirt, where each wrinkle is sub-wrinkled with smaller wrinkles and so on. We've "ironed out" the biggest wrinkles, there are infinitely more but they are much smaller. We're perhaps over half-way ironed, in a quantitative sense.
A googolplex looks to be the first number we've found that is too big to be contained in our universe.
A googolplex is "too big to be contained" in our universe yet here we are talking about it. We can perform operations on this number, compare it to other numbers, and even come up with mathematical proofs showing that it's too big to exist. There are an infinite amount of numbers larger than a googolplex and we could have an infinite amount of conversations about them. The material limit of the universe does not limit our ability to create information, to learn things.
There isn't enough space in the universe for an infinite series, either, yet we can (and do) still use them, we reason about them, we learn from them. We can even reduce some infinite series to a finite number. The material bounds of the universe are not a limit of knowledge.
I don't think we know enough to be able to state that definitively. It's feasible that the universe behaves mathematically (it seems to so far) and thus possible to gain a thorough understanding of the underlying principles, if not the specific facts (c.f. with understanding how to produce integers yet not "knowing" all the integers).
Even if the universe doesn't have underlying rules to be discovered, there's still a limit to number of configurations available to particles etc. within our visible universe. Although that number might appear to be infinite to us, it's actually drastically closer to zero than to infinity.
So, if there is indeed some finite limit, then using y = e^x would be the wrong function as that doesn't approach a finite value.
Is the optimal move in an a given chess board considered knowledge? If so, can't we create entirely new sets of knowledge from the emergent properties of an arbitrary set of rules called a "game"? If we can create an infinite set of arbitrary combinations of rules and states (games), then knowledge should be infinite. Maybe not all knowledge is scientifically applicable, but we have learned a great deal about science and engineering from studying chess. In fact, we are starting to learn more about learning as a process and not as some magical thing that human beings can do, just from studying the best way to make decisions in this totally-contrived and scientifically-useless game.
Taking this a step further, let's look at the animal kingdom. If learning about the intricacies of the mating habits of birds can help an arbitrary bird increase its impact on the future gene pool, is that knowledge not worth something to the bird? To bird society? Are the things we learn about ourselves knowledge? They certainly have utility. Is there any limit to what we can learn about ourselves, about the stochastic process of life? Is life not part of the universe?
Is computer science even knowledge? It seems if we're more directly concerned with the physical nature of the universe, we ought not to care about what the system of a computer actually does; we only need to care about what it is, about its physical structure. Except, that's not actually how we pursue knowledge or science at all.
In my view, Asimov's sentiment can be reduced to a complete tautology: we're at the point where we know almost everything there is to know about the things we think we can know.