A quote that we all laughed at but I think he maybe was right.

I'm sure this will age like a fine wine by 2040.

It's simply been subsumed by a model of technology that actively hurts people, i.e. a16z type projects.

That's why we're sick of it. We know that it involves pain and extraction from us of our social circles, sanity, productivity, resources, etc.

Compare surveys on AI optimism (tech proxy) for countries where antisocial billionaires are black bagged and sent to an underground prison in Xinjiang and you'll understand where the tech optimism went.

What's becoming more important in human's relationship with technology is restraint. Dopamine comes from the journey, not the destination, and for a journey to be meaningful, there needs to be some amount of challenge / struggle. The increasingly important skill to lead a fulfilled existence is learning how to optimally balance ease vs. challenge.

That is exactly what the article is not.

The article seems (at least to me) to be about the uses of technology, and how deeply that interacts with both a) what people want and b) what people are willing to tolerate to get what they want.

The examples here are not architectures or benchmarks, they are stories about the slow change of real life, even if the rate of technological change blurs and accelerates to some degree. It's about the flattening curve of demand and deployment (markets), not of capability.

Yes, the internet, cpu speeds, etc etc, and now LLMs, but the water heater example is an analogy for how "We only want so much of this stuff, and eventually we'll figure out how much is enough". Steve Jobs quotes pin this to consumer tech even more: You don't want the prettiest thing, you want what solves people's real problems in a way that works for them.

TFA is trying to show that you can make a better widget, but its impact might fade into the background, countering the "technoptimist" "singularity" "exponentionaly blah blah", or whatever narrative.

Nope. It goes higher and higher faster and faster, but that's not what a singularity is.

The author I think made a very apt comparison to hot water heaters. I expect in days gone past, there were probably amateur plumbers and HVA/C specialists that were just as obsessed with novel developments in water heating and cooling technology as the author was obsessed with the RAM on their Gateway desktop and the bandwidth of their internet connection. Certainly, you saw this dynamic with motor vehicles back in the 50s and 60s when engine displacement was increasing every year, alongside other new features like fuel injectors and 12V electrical systems. Each model year was a genuine upgrade over the last.

And so too, I feel confident that there will be new technologies which will attract the same kind of fervor even as computers and information technology become commodities as previous technologies did. You can sort of see the development of that culture right now in bioscience, as people share tips on their “supplement stacks,” and their skincare regimens, and track which drugs are passing through the the FDA clinical trial pipeline.