Post-Scarcity Leads to Technological Stagnation

The Palladium Letter

SubscribeSign in

Post-Scarcity Leads to Technological Stagnation<br>The bottleneck of the computer age is not compute, but ideas for how to use it.<br>Jul 31, 2026

Share

Ryan Searle/Aerial photography of parking lot<br>This article by Charles Rosenbauer was published at Palladium Magazine on July 31, 2026.<br>Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

For less than a thousand dollars, a modern consumer laptop may be capable of trillions of calculations per second. But consumers’ applications of this hardware are often disappointing. Many are products of Wirth’s law, the observation that over time, software gets less efficient faster than hardware gets more efficient.<br>The occasional video stream may use a significant amount of compute, but modern browsers spend truly vast amounts of resources to display little more than formatted text and images on the screen, often with performance hiccups. Meanwhile, a video game from twenty years ago may require a fraction of the resources of today’s internet browsers such as Google Chrome, even as it draws myriads of polygons across millions of pixels, with elaborate lighting and shading effects computed on top.<br>The text editor in which this article is being written is doing very little that could not be done just as well on a computer from thirty years ago—a machine with thousands of times less memory and a million times less computing power. For the average person, compute is available in such great abundance that it exceeds our knowledge of how to put it all to productive use.<br>This abundance is famously the product of Moore’s Law, which asserts that transistor densities, and presumably performance, grow at an exponential rate. It has been true for the past six decades, and for those working in tech, this rapid growth is grounds for optimism about the future of humanity in general. They believe the endpoint of industrial society is post-scarcity: an edenic condition in which we are no longer constrained by resources and all hard problems of material life are solved, allowing human creativity to flourish and actualize anything it may desire.<br>While Moore’s Law has exceeded expectations, there is nothing at all to suggest any flaw in Gordon Moore’s central warning that his law was a result of economics, not physics. Accordingly, the future of computing will be determined not by our ability to innovate technologically, but by our ability to conceptualize what this compute would be used for.<br>For the moment, artificial intelligence seems to have supplied the answer. The large language model is the first consumer application in decades whose appetite for hardware has no visible ceiling: hundreds of millions of people now route their questions, drafts, and small work tasks through chatbots that are absorbing the functions of the search engine, customer service, and a growing share of clerical labor. This may sustain the industry at something like its present scale once the infrastructure buildout is complete, despite its current unprofitability. Firms are increasingly using customer-service agents, automated Excel spreadsheets, and low-level software engineering, but the claim that every firm will see autonomous agents that consume tokens by the billions sits uneasily with these prevailing uses.<br>The current buildout is a wager that there is more to come. If we find ourselves in a state where consumers and firms have more computational resources than we know what to do with, and struggle to name problems that we care about but lack the resources to immediately address, then it will indicate a bottleneck not in the production of goods but in the production of ideas—a much harder problem to solve. A world in which humanity lacks the imagination or ambition to strive for anything even greater than what is implied by the idea of “post-scarcity” is, upon closer inspection, a pessimistic prospect.<br>The Start of the Curve

Much of early computing was focused on automating various forms of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is overwhelmingly linear: simple records for each citizen or customer. Even if millions of computations are required to process a single person, a modern laptop may be able to process facts about the entire world’s population in less than an hour. Exponential growth in computation has rapidly overwhelmed the demands of bureaucratic systems, yet pen-and-paper processes like signatures remain everywhere in the digital world. Public-key cryptography solved this problem properly decades ago; DocuSign still has 7,000 employees today.<br>Exciting advances in computing were for a long time downstream of those working to improve the graphics of video games, not administration. In the 1970s and 1980s, the number of pixels on the screen often greatly exceeded the number of bytes in memory, requiring a variety of methods for specifying...