Hard to believe it's been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we've come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways
I'm a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don't want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.
Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we're not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn't caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don't have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That's at least a decade away
Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn't very widespread. We're again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance
Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It's so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they're just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that's copyrighted, but claim it's for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn't make any sense and just looks like they're going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty...
It just seems like there's a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don't see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?
The reason why those economic limits exist is because we're reaching the limit of what's physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn't fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there's going to be a wall. Of note currently we're talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.
Long story short: Node shrinks aren't the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven't been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn't have engineered FinFETs) but it's really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don't really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you're building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.