alt Hacker News> There seems to be some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be.
But don't we see this everywhere, all the time? Pull up any of the recent Claude Code threads about the product's declining quality and you'll see at least a handful of well-upvoted comments about how text generators are definitely going to get cheaper while simultaneously getting "better" over time.
New things, like computers, get better and cheaper because they are new, so there is a lot of room for improvement. We have had a very long time to optimize making cotton into clothing, or growing and transporting wheat. There is a limit to how cheap those things can get for a given quality point and a given level of technology, and we've pretty much reached it.