Every starry eyed AI/ML piece has me thinking, yes but where's the power going to come from? And where's the power on top to encrypt all this?
And quantum computing? Super-cooling at scale? Aye right pal.
The elegance of the AGC and it's approach to computing could provide a good starting point to a solution out of our mess.
to quote from a 2004 paper by Don Eyles, one of the AGC programmers:
"When Hal Laning designed the Executive and Waitlist system in the mid 1960's, he made it up from whole cloth with no examples to guide him. The design is still valid today. The allocation of functions among a sensible number of asynchronous processes, under control of a rate- and priority-driven preemptive executive, still represents the state of the art in real-time GN&C computers for spacecraft."
The trend is to use microprocessors for increasingly trivial things. You use that power to implement a UI, or a light bulb, or charger. That is far less important than driving a spac ship. But isn't that true of most things we develop?
I agree that the trend towards browser based apps is not always efficient. But the browser does a surprising amount in the background to even out hardware differences. It helps you take advantage of the hardware (like a powerful GPU) without having to worry about specifics. That was never exactly easy in developing a conventional native app on a traditional OS.