Computing power was always getting smaller, faster and cheaper every year at an increasing rate. A log linear improvement. One of Tom Hanks' lines from Apollo 13 comes to mind. "..things like a computer that can fit into a single room, and hold millions of pieces of information" was considered a great leap forward. And it was.

But now? The rate of real improvement in our daily lives from technology has slowed to a crawl. In fact, computing power is no longer getting smaller, faster, cheaper. It's the opposite. The amount of effort, measured in time and cost, required to get the next advancement has become ever increasing, while the amount of net improvement in our lives from those advancements is ever decreasing. Worse, the physical footprint and natural resources needed to get those ever decreasing net improvements is scaling to astronomical levels. The backlash in the video is understandable. People see little to no improvement in their lives from this "technology", yet it's sucking up their water in a water stressed world and doubling their electric bills. No wonder they're pissed.

Instead of scaling downward to the size of your palm (cell phones), it's scaling up to the size of large farms and gorging on limited resources. The wrong direction. And for what? A quick rehash of existing data and the need to baby sit it constantly to ensure the model isn't going off the rails with what it spits out? I'm hard pressed to even call that a modest improvement. And before your start with ...but...but....but....your buts are about as real and proven and possible physically as faster than light travel and teleportation.

Another movie analogy. Steve Martin and John Candy blissfully driving in the wrong direction. Just substitute tech bros for the actors and you've got where we are right now. Except we're all in the car.