Comment by jeremyjh

This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological progress had been driven by the pressures of the second world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be solved with software which expanded the problem set rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to the problem of software, we don't know that there are other barriers that would slow progress so much.