So what if consumption is easier? Does that mean less people will create something? Why? Creating something doesn’t get harder because consumption gets easier. I don’t see the causal connection.
(That central authority bullshit is just patent nonsense.)
Oh, and our tools for creation still are rapidly improving. Prices for computers have gone nothing but down. People are today able to buy a great PC and a tablet for the same price of a PC ten years ago. Software has become hugely more accessible, hardware has become so much more capable. Creating stuff was never – never – as easy as it is today.
We are living in a golden age of content creation and in a golden of content consumption. Tablets will help with that, not hinder.
You're absolutely right that there's no necessary dichotomy, but in practice that's what's happening. The iPad could be an awesome platform for a Squeak-like development environment where you create and program a bunch of objects and have them interact with each other. But Apple won't allow such an app in their store which makes it unavailable to the large majority of users, and if they had their way jailbreaking your iPad to run it would be a federal crime.
Oh, and our tools for creation still are rapidly improving. Prices for computers have gone nothing but down. People are today able to buy a great PC and a tablet for the same price of a PC ten years ago.
That's true, today. But if tablets replace PCs for most people as many are predicting, PC prices will go up substantially: partly due to reduced economies of scale, and partly because reducing the market to professionals and geeks will allow more price discrimination.
Tablets will improve.
You predictions of doom are way overblown.
The argument seems coherent enough to me. I'm not entirely convinced about the "centralized authority" part, but the "tools for consumption advancing faster than tools for production" seems true (and inevitable).