Not a "what if".
Can you name 3 new cool technologies that have come out in the last 5 years?
2. Copilot for Windows Notepad
3. Copilot for Windows 11 Start Menu
Nobody, not even Apple was using the term "Apple Silicon" in 2010.
The first M series Macs shipped November 2020.
I'm bored.
Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.
Like the ability for computers to generate images/videos/songs so reliably that we are debating if it is going to ruin human artists... whether you think that is terrible or good it would be dumb to say "nothing is happening in tech".
https://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2025/12/i-made-the-xkcd-impo...
The xkcd comic is from 11 years ago (September 2014).
Also what does three prove? Is three supposed to be a benchmark of some kind?
I would wager every year there are dozens, probably hundreds, of novel technologies being successfully commercialized. The rate is exponentially increasing.
New procedural generation methods for designing parking garages.
New manufacturing approaches for fuselage assembly of aircraft.
New cold-rolled steel shaping and folding methods.
New solid state battery assembly methods.
New drug discovery and testing methods.
New mineral refinement processes.
New logistics routing software.
New heat pump designs.
New robotics actuators.
See what I mean?
I would wager we are very far from peak complexity, and as long as complexity keeps increasing there will always be opportunities to do meaningful innovative work.
2. We may be at the peak complexity that our sources of energy will support. (Though the transition to renewables may help with that.)
3. We may be at the peak complexity that humans can stand without too many of them becoming dehumanized by their work. I could see evidence for this one already appearing in society, though I'm not certain that this is the cause.
2. Kardachev? You think we are at peak energy production? Fusion? Do you see energy usage slowing down, or speeding up, or staying constant?
3. Is the evidence you're seeing appear in society just evidence you're seeing appear in media? If media is an industry that competes for attention, and the best way to get and keep attention is not telling truth but novel threats + viewpoint validation, could it be that the evidence isn't actually evidence but misinformation? What exactly makes people feel dehumanized? Do you think people felt more or less dehumanized during the great depression and WW2? Do you think the world is more or less complex now than then?
From the points you're making you seem young (maybe early-mid 20s) and I wonder if you feel this way because you're early in your career and haven't experienced what makes work meaningful. In my early career I worked jobs like front-line retail and maintenance. Those jobs were not complex, and they felt dehumanizing. I was not appreciated. The more complex my work has become, the more creative I get to be, the more I'm appreciated for doing it, and the more human I feel. I can't speak for "society" but this has been a strong trend for me. Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact. Maybe people who are caught up in huge complex companies tossed around doing valueless meaningless work feel dehumanized. That makes sense to me, but I don't think the problem is complexity, I think the problem is getting paid to be performative instead of creating real value for other people. Integrity misalignment. Being paid to act in ways that aren't in alignment with personal values is dehumanizing (literally dissolves our humanity).
I've had meaningful work, and I've enjoyed it. But I'm seeing more and more complexity that doesn't actually add anything, or at least doesn't add enough value to be worth the extra effort to deal with it all. I've seen products get more and more bells and whistles added that fewer and fewer people cared about, even as they made the code more and more complex. I've seen good products with good teams get killed because management didn't think the numbers looked right. (I've seen management mess things up several other ways, too.)
You say "Maybe it's because I work directly for customers and I know the work I do has an impact". And that's real! But see, the more complex things get, the more the work gets fragmented into different specialties, and the (relative) fewer of us work directly with customers, and so the fewer of us get to enjoy that.
Yes I see your point better now, however I still think this is temporary. It's probably something like accidental/manufactured complexity is friction, and I'm this example the friction is dehumanizing jobs. You're right this is a limiting factor. My theory is that something will get shaken up and refactored and a bunch of the accidental complexity that doesn't effectively increase global entropy will fall off, and then real complexity will continue to rise.
I'm kind of thinking out loud here and conflating system design with economics, sociology, antitrust, organizational design, etc. Not sure if this makes sense but maybe in this context real complexity increases global entropy and manufactured complexity doesn't.
Manufactured complexity oscillates and real complexity increases over longer time horizons.
So what you see as approaching a limit (in the context of our lifetimes) is the manufactured complexity, and I agree.
My point is that real complexity is far from its limit.
I'm a lot less confident, but suspect, that if real complexity rises and manufactured complexity decreases we will see jobs on average become better aligned with human qualities. (Drop in dehumanizing jobs)
Not sure how long this will take. Maybe a generation?
And in fact, if you have multiple firms in competition, the one that can decrease accidental complexity the most has a competitive advantage. Maybe such firms will survive and firms with more accidental complexity will die out.