Well, my take on it, is that only so much money, business or retail can get sucked up in tech, gold, or anything else for that matter. Retial tech has quickly matured where the delivery vehicles are hard to sell, low profit, and getting junky. Software as a retail business depends on installed bases which corrupts the usability of the system eventually as the hardware and software obsoletes. It gets expensive fast. I gave up buying MS software upgrades long ago. It's like having one car company, and having to buy a new model to go slightly faster every 18 months.
I don't think anyone is saying that technology or science will not have a place in tomorrows world. I am never going to buy an abacus or a stone axe again. Once was enough of that "high tech". On the other hand, I think computers can suck up enormous amounts of time, and money too. 65% of new spending in mining and exploration companies in new capital equipment in 1998 was on high tech computers and software! That is going too far! I won't do geophysics plotting or data collection by hand anymore. We have to use computers and high tech data gathering instruments, and that is getting ever more high techier too.
The limit to tech is its market penetration and everyman's ability to use it, for a large part. The business penetration will be much better as business needs are more specialized, and can bear the cost of more expensive systems. There is no crying need to get much cheaper if the system saves money and time for the business - and well written, with good hardware, it can. Medical tech and industrial tech will advance as it always has.
Many industries, too hidebound for too long improperly resisted technical advances in the 80's that could have saved them millions for trivial expenditures. I worked for an iron milling company that would not install digital controllers, such as Heath H-8 computers, which were cheap, and we had studies to prove their installation process control efficiencies. Instead we installed huge and expensive analog controllers that functioned but were far below available capability. Mangement did not trust digital controls that were cheap then. So Fluke, Johnson, Gould and Sperry unloaded their analog junk for huge bucks and much money was lost. Later they dominated the area of async boards, overselling in that area too, where PC boards would have blown the junk away with mininal programming, sealing and isolation. What did that mill lose by neandrathal outlook? (Cleveland Cliffs) I would say perhaps 2 -3 million or more a year (60 million by now), and perhaps 5 years of ore left behind. One analog controller alone in 1981 did save 700 thou per year in reagants. The engineer who did the H-8 tests told me that computers on all the mills and processes would save that much per computer per year. Little things like the amount of grinding media per mill per hour added can be controlled by non drifting digital feedback controls to save horsepower and therefore loads of money. Payback for some of this stuff was in weeks.
So, yes tech will march on. But retail tech is a slow marcher and installed bases are slow to change. Look at HDTV, and the computer itself. Flat screen companies going out of business. It has become a retail nightmare. I have tried to interest people in building a better GUI for Unix/Linux. With the installed base, and high reliability and Windows overlap, its potential would be staggering. But many investors do not have the knowledge of where the money is made. And others busines failures have to be theirs too, as if everyone has to be a success in every field to get them to look into the ahead and see the future clearly. Without knowledgeable investors you are nowhere.
The thing is -- the concept of the need for technology is gestalt. Industry needs tech, retail people can use it too. But that is the only reason for tech its need to do other things better. It is not an end in itself. So let's point the tech at what it can do - better farming, better mining, fishing, medicine, comms etc.. but it has to fulfill a need. It does not mean that we stop needing to harvest resources. Some people, I fear, envision a pollyanna world where 3rd world miners and loggers send us the cheap resources and we send them back the high tech engineering to enable them to make the stuff cheap. But it is they not we who will get smart and employ the tech. When they stop doing, so will they forget how to do better. Our margin in that department will quickly erode. And it is just as high tech to figure out how to pump a slurry from point A to B, cheap, as it is to design a computer chip, despite the suits' protestations. Let them design an volute optimally for efficiency and wear for a centrifugal pump - and do the metallurgy of the surfaces. It is not just out of the caveman's book.
It's all about what we want to do, the basics. There are only so many things we have to do, and want to do. There is shelter, warmth, sustenance, travel, communications, reproduction and tools for these. Maybe we can add protection from Insects, Sharks, Bears, Lions, Tigers and lawyers too. It would seem that politicians only have one of the above, down pat, and have taken the easy way out for the getting the others. Perhaps too easy for all for them. All they have to do is move their lips and they get it all for free. They should not think that we can do that magic too.
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