> I fail to see the connection between the computers’ efficiency and standard of living. You seem to have made quite a big leap there. Can you please elaborate?

> I fail to see the connection between the computers’ efficiency and standard of living. You seem to have made quite a big leap there. Can you please elaborate? It is a big leap, and it's probably better suited for an essay than a HN comment. But the general idea is that most improvements to standard of living have relied on technology, whether that's agriculture (past 5000 years); plumbing and sanitation (past 2000 years); transportation and mass production (past 500 years); or calculation, communication and automation (past 50 years). Humanity has been on an exponential curve of improvement for a hundred years, if not many hundreds. If this exponential in fact turns out to be more of a sigmoid function, and technological development eventually stops, it will have huge repercussions for our entire society. I'm personally not fully convinced we've reached the end, but there are signs that we already have or will soon. Even if you think the chance of this happening is low, the consequences of an end to technological progress is huge. We need technologists, economists, socialists, politicians, and even fiction writers to be investigating this potentiality. The fact that this is not heavily studied is disturbing.