I think the complacency you describe is only side of the coin. People are happy as long as knowledge doesn't empower other people more than it does them, but as soon as you see and say that the emperor has no clothes (especially if they're the emperor), the lawyers and the Luddites descend like the four horsemen of the infopacalyse.
Admittedly, I don't think general purpose computing will in any sense "disappear," but I do think that we are already in a technological depression ("where's my flying car already?") and the witches metaphor is particularly apt. Until "normal" people catch up on the details of general purpose computers ("what's a filesystem?") and feel empowered by them (confident enough to secure their own systems, and write software to automate their lives), we will continue to stagnate, and embedded devices will thrive. The proliferation of embedded devices is a barometer of the public's aversion to generality, pure and simple... I would even expect a new model for general purpose computing to result from the current Cambrian explosion eventually, and be a net win. But I think it's important to realize we spend less time inventing today than 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, and more time dealing with the political and social response to the full implications of the current breadth of computing if only because it is still entering the mainstream. Anyone interested in pushing the limits today has to focus as much, if not more, on addressing the distaste for change, as on the underlying technology (at least if they want to put their name on it). Designing and coding Bitcoin is the easy part...
Admittedly, I don't think general purpose computing will in any sense "disappear," but I do think that we are already in a technological depression ("where's my flying car already?") and the witches metaphor is particularly apt. Until "normal" people catch up on the details of general purpose computers ("what's a filesystem?") and feel empowered by them (confident enough to secure their own systems, and write software to automate their lives), we will continue to stagnate, and embedded devices will thrive. The proliferation of embedded devices is a barometer of the public's aversion to generality, pure and simple... I would even expect a new model for general purpose computing to result from the current Cambrian explosion eventually, and be a net win. But I think it's important to realize we spend less time inventing today than 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, and more time dealing with the political and social response to the full implications of the current breadth of computing if only because it is still entering the mainstream. Anyone interested in pushing the limits today has to focus as much, if not more, on addressing the distaste for change, as on the underlying technology (at least if they want to put their name on it). Designing and coding Bitcoin is the easy part...