I can now indulge in going overboard in technological extremes, cultivating that mastery of a very very imaginary world, consisting of bits, compilers, installers, and about a million other slang words. The trouble is, that this opinion is not shared by everyone. I see people struggling to get their computers to do something new. I see people asking their neighbours to help them figure out why things aren't working yet, or stopped working for no clear reason. I see large enterprises moving from one project to the next, phasing in and out both software and hardware, and getting burried in the conversion efforts needed to maintain a sense of long-term continuity.
Computers are a nightmare.
Get a new one and you'll see the latest and greatest fail to behave as expected. There are millions of people on this planet, trying to keep up and understand how to deal with them every day. And there are millions more people, struggling to start, fix, or recover things - all related to computers. Fifty years from now, the human race will be faced with an unbelievable digital soup of information, most of which will be unreadable and un-processable. Every major advancement in information technology will be buried in revision conflicts, complete rewrites, incompatible changes, and more abandoned than active information.