i'm realizing that a major reason lots of technically savvy people believe weird things about the future is that they have accepted an idea, over the last ~10 years of software trying to eat the world: that anything computable is inevitably, nay soon, going to become practical to compute, at scale, everywhere, for everyone.
Part of this is that we now live in a world where there are large numbers of software people with no hardware knowledge, and they greatly outnumber hardware people.
And even the software people are often what I'd call API-pushers – people who fancy themselves Programmers but who really only know how to hook up preexisting systems together to make things go. Their contact with computers is through many layers of abstraction, and they believe largely in making the machine do things through the manipulation of symbols.
So if you point out to them that there are physical limits to transistor density – that you eventually start hitting up against hard rules about how matter behaves as you try to slap more transistors on a wafer – their brains shut down. Moore's Law failed well over a decade ago but these people still believe it.
