it's kind of an article of personal faith, you could say, that I think we can have a lot of the same gadgets that we're used to having now, what we think of as "technology", that's built from much simpler units
our manufacturing processes are horrendously circuitous. supply chains get stretched out to ridiculous length because everyone along the way is skimming off some rent. inefficiency is profitable
it's affected how we design things. everything has microcontrollers in it now, doing jobs that can be done by a few discrete components sometimes
centralized approaches to design are favored over aggressive parallelism. like, how we explore space. we should have been putting lots of little probes out, but instead everything gets channelled into a few deluxe missions. we could have a lot more data than we do now
eh, just blue-skying