When will technical progress carry us beyond computer performance and memory limitations?
To expect the impressive, technical gains in speed and memory capacity to remove performance pains is to confuse the human and technical levels of the problem. (See question 7.) After all, our problem is not experienced directly as a lack of computational power; it is felt, rather, as inconvenient delay, lost personal time, the inaccessibility of “cutting-edge” software, and the difficulty of working with awkwardly performing tools. No technical advances are ever likely to alter the fundamental shape of these problems, because the advances and our frustrations lie on separate planes. In fact, as long as we are driven to desire the latest technology for its own sake (which is very much part of the human side of the problem), memory improvements and all the technical innovations they stimulate can only worsen our situation: the pace of change accelerates, new inventions proliferate, and every cutting-edge toy we play with is now twelve months instead of twenty-four months away from the i
