I too am absolutely fascinated by this. Seems to be this behaviour that humans have to mine a particular area until it's completely exhausted - you can see this in capitalism, in art, in fossil fuel consumption/extraction, in mouse and animal models of drug trails, silicon computer chips, Internet businesses, search engines and everything else.

We never seem to realise while we are on the part of the curve that's accelerating (and things are great) that it's actually a bell curve. There are probably people writing things about this sort of stuff, how we can maybe start to overlap our understanding, maybe even measure what part of the curve we are on? Maybe get governments to invest money into new technologies just at the right points...