Sometimes that exponential gain gets partially squandered to provide for greater productivity or lower cost development or marketing gimmicks or tiny little improvements in the fringe UX which can offer subtle delights.
Other times the product is something constant and perfectly standardized like MWs or kWh (generation or storage of energy) and we can sit back as a society and watch the prices fall, fall, fall.
The endgame is abundant electricity at a fraction of the ecological cost used pervasively to power every aspect of the economy.
Electric cars aren’t sci-fi anymore. Now we dream of flying through electrical power alone, which is about as ostentatious as it gets.
It’s perhaps not the popular opinion on HN, and obviously a lot is at stake, but this is the making of the carbon-neutral economy, and it’s being done in a technologically and market driven approach that doesn’t involve trillions of dollars of taxes or regulatory burden.
I do not believe it will prove to be too little or too late. I absolutely believe that technologies will continue to evolve and be discovered that allow us to move our global ecological impact from the red (deficit) to the green (surplus) and in the very long term from a political sense, but in the blink of an eye for our planet, this 21st century panic will seem really quite overblown.
It’s crucially import for people to care. For people to dream up new ways to stop damaging the planet and even heal the planet. I just think time and again we underestimate human ingenuity and overestimate calamity.
Global climate [change] indeed impacts millions of people every year and carries a massive economic cost. I have absolute faith in the scientists and the inventors to constantly push us toward a healthy, clean, efficient, and abundant future.