Lately I feel like we have built a society with expansive software infrastructure, where that software is doomed to be crappy and inhumane because our society actually couldn't afford to build this quantity of software well.
So another hypothetical fantasy solution would be a lot less software, like being careful about where we used software, using it in fewer places, so that we could collectively afford to make that careful intentional software higher quality.
Certainly a society like that would look very different, both in terms of the outcome and in terms of a society that is capable of making and executing a decision to do that.
Just "my hunch", but one I reflect on a lot these days.
But this incredibly hypothetical. A lot of software labor today revolving around manipulating the user rather than aiding them so where we'd go with "better" versions of this is hard to say.
Oh! I thought you were going to say "testing teams, design reviewers, trainers".
I'm not on-board with this "10-50x" claim for the amount of effort. I'd say maybe 3x the effort, given the developers have been well-trained, the methodology is sound, and the managers' focus is exclusively quality. That last item is one I've never experienced; the closest I came was on a banking project where the entire development team was subordinated to the Head of Testing.
Getting everybody (or even a minority of any sufficient size) to act in service to a single goal has been a problem for humanity ever since we first invented society.
It takes time and effort to optimize software for performance, user-friendliness, developer-friendliness and everything that ethical and mindful developers hold up so highly, but that’s not the kind of thing that the big money or academic prestige is very interested in. The goal is to get the most users possible to participate in something that doesn’t repulse them and ideally draws them in. The concerns of ethics, dignity, and utility are just consequences to settle, occasionally dealt with before the world raises a stink about it, but are hardly ever part of the M.O.
Imagine if developers could make a dignified living working to listen to people and see what they really need or want and can focus on that instead of having to come up with a better ‘feature set’ than their competitors. It’s essentially why we have hundreds of different Dr. Pepper ripoffs sold as ‘alternatives’ to Dr. Pepper (is this really a good use of resources?) instead of making the best Dr. Pepper or finding a way to tailor the base Dr. Pepper to the consumers taste, assuming enough people claim they want a different Dr. Pepper.
That said, I think the reason the situation is not going to change is clearly economic. That's not saying that bad software is cheaper. But there's a strong incentive to cheap, bad practices because cutting corners allows one person/organization to save money now with the (greater) costs being picked by the organization itself later, the organization's customers and society at large. Moreover, software isn't amendable to the standards of other sorts of engineering and so there's no way to have contracts or regulations demanding software of a certain standard or quality.
Edit: The only imaginable solution would be a technological revolution that allowed cheaper and better software with same technology also not allowing even cheaper and worse software.