It's generally accepted fact that "the free ride is over". It's more difficult to argue that we'd be better off if it had happened sooner, that we'd escape more

It's generally accepted fact that "the free ride is over". It's more difficult to argue that we'd be better off if it had happened sooner, that we'd escape more quickly to better global optima if the local optimum we're stuck in wasn't quite so deep. Improvements to the processors we've made by adding more cache, executing instructions out of order, predicting branches better etc are making it more difficult to escape from the conclusion we've reached. To use GP's analogy, there's now a gas station for every suburb and a garage for every house. We know better solutions are possible, but getting from here to there is going to be difficult and expensive, and it could be worse than the status quo for the early adopters in the short term.