[sloowm]

For the Sci-Fi answer our language would be optimized for extremely fast communication, maybe making sounds from our mouths alone would be way to inefficient. We probably would have easily made stuff that caught up with our cognition. The current hardware and software is more a representation of human limits than other limits.

I think the frame of wasteful is not correct. It's wasteful not to use resources if other resources are restricted and can be substituted by the plentiful. Of course the allocation of current resources can be debated but that is not caused by extra CPU performance, storage and RAM that is available.