It does feel weird, in general I'm averse to terms like "social imperative", but what I like to think the author is getting at is that humanity can get vastly m

It does feel weird, in general I'm averse to terms like "social imperative", but what I like to think the author is getting at is that humanity can get vastly more utility out of computing if we move away from this abstraction layer between the operations we want to perform and the hardware we perform them on. General purpose hardware is great when you're working out what sorts of things you want to do with it, experimenting, but when you already know exactly what you want to do it is extremely inefficient, and just churning out a machine that does exactly what you want is much better for everybody.