> Since most time scales are fixed by human re- action times, habits, and other physiological and psycho- logical factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of units— political, organizational, economic, and cultural — affected by technological operations. That is, instead of performing the same operations as before in less time, now larger-scale operations were performed in the same time.
We call von Neumann architectures to the very devices that have allowed to operate--by proxy, so far--in different timescales. And we do tons of stuff these days in less time, thanks in part to von Neumann.
Had he lived today, I would imagine he would be still concerned with timescales and sizes of physical places, but from an entirely different perspective.