That piece of tech development will cost $750k

As we race to the bottom, in that dystopian future where chatbots will wipe our grandparents’ arses and all roles in banking will be carried out by Marvin the paranoid android—like, the same machine will do the lot, having brute-force-solved human nature right?—we cannot help but pause and remark at that last great anomaly: that is, how goddamn expensive any kind of technology implementation is.

Not just buying an application — “software as a service”, naturellement — that reviews and unimpressively marks up confidentiality agreements for half a million bucks a year, but even a small piece of development work to an exisitng system, just to make sure it does something that any two-bit home-made iPhone app can do faultlessly — is budgeted to take six months and cost $800k.