[streetcat1]

So I see two possible explanations:

1) Moore law started at the seventies and its about to end within few years. It might be that we got too lazy?

2) The economy become much more market driven/competitive. I.e. management went from technical to financial. Hence when the goal of innovating is financial , it is much more short term.

The reason for optimism today are :

1) Moore law is ending, hence we should see many new hardware architectures and the software to follow.

2) Open source - companies can start innovating without the need to build basic staff.

[api]

Your first is really fascinating. I've seldom heard anyone talk about potential negatives from Moore's Law. It seems like you're suggesting that the rapid improvement of computer tech over the time since 1970 sucked all the air out of the room. All the brains, capital, and hype went there.

I'm not convinced it's enough but it is pretty interesting.

[streetcat1]

As a general rule, innovation in software always follow hardware. E.g. deep learning.

With Moore law, it was always the case that general purpose CPU will always catch up to special purpose one (e.g. This killed sun and SGI), so it was hurting innovation.

[teddyh]

> With Moore law, it was always the case that general purpose CPU will always catch up to special purpose one (e.g. This killed sun and SGI),

And it also killed the Lisp Machines before that.