[foley]

Software! Every time I poke around the code of any sufficiently complex piece of software I find myself overwhelmed with the endless levels of abstraction. One benefit of plateauing hardware performance will be the slowing of the hardware churn. As innovation slows we will hopefully converge on optimal units of computation and interfaces.

As diversity decreases it will be much easier to write libraries that talk directly to the metal, protocols that write directly to the interfaces and applications that run completely isolated at native speed.

Without the towers of abstraction it is much easier to reason about the data structures of your input and output and design optimal algorithms. If we ever do come to this point there will be a renaissance in the field of computer science field.

[ghaff]

Maybe. Much of the history of computer science is the layering of abstractions. Indeed, the transition to multi-core hasn't been the disaster that many feared because various abstractions (game engines, rendering engines, Hadoop, etc.) abstract parallelism in important ways where that parallelism is actually needed.