CPU/GPU processing power is clearly making steady progress and looks like it will continue. Yet nobody thinks we will be able to brute-force 2048-bit RSA with t

CPU/GPU processing power is clearly making steady progress and looks like it will continue. Yet nobody thinks we will be able to brute-force 2048-bit RSA with the best sieve techniques even if the progress continues for 100 years. It is clearly not sufficient just to have some measure of growth to achieve some goal. It is necessary to have the growth actually matter compared to a measure of the problem difficulty. I would argue for self-driving cars as in Level 4/5 autonomy, nobody even has any useful measure or understanding of the problem difficulty. It's really easy to understand the autonomous driving levels. It's also really easy to understand the Kardashev scale. It might just turn out that both are of equally little practical relevance in our lifetimes. I know this is a boring situation, but there is no guarantee the universe shouldn't be boring.