The theme of the article dovetails with the thesis from Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource, taken here from wikipedia:

The overarching thesis on why there is no resource crisis is that as a particular resource becomes more scarce, its price rises. This price rise creates an incentive for people to discover more of the resource, ration and recycle it, and eventually, develop substitutes. The "ultimate resource" is not any particular physical object but the capacity for humans to invent and adapt.

The work opens with an explanation of scarcity, noting its relation to price; high prices denote relative scarcity and low prices indicate abundance. Simon usually measures prices in wage-adjusted terms, since this is a measure of how much labor is required to purchase a fixed amount of a particular resource. Since prices for most raw materials (e.g., copper) have fallen between 1800 and 1990 (adjusting for wages and adjusting for inflation), Simon argues that this indicates that those materials have become less scarce.

It's honestly a soothing thought that electricity use in the US has flatlined for ten years. Ten years ago I would have thought that bringing that sort of trendline down would be impossible.

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading..

Computer scientist,economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls itthe "tacit dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants"; philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the"periphery".

All say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed to use them withoutthinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals. The idea of integrating computers seamlessly into the world at large runs counter to a number of present-day trends. "Ubiquitous computing" in this context does not just mean computers that can be carried to the beach,jungle or airport. Even the most powerful notebook computer, with access to a worldwide information network,still focuses attention on a single box. By analogy to writing, carrying a super-laptop is like owning just one very important book. Customizing this book, even writing millions of other books, does not begin to capture the real power of literacy. Furthermore, although ubiquitous computers may employ sound and video in addition to text and graphics, that does not make them "multimedia computers." Today's multimedia machine makes the computer screen into a demanding focus of attention rather than allowing it to fade into the background.

Mark Weiser, Scientific American 1991, coining the term "ubiquitous computing"

As powerful as they are, capitalism and tech progress won’t solve all of our environmental challenges. They won’t automatically deal with pollution (of which greenhouse gas pollution is the most harmful), protect endangered species and vulnerable communities. So we need people to advocate for wise policies (like conservation, pollution limits, safeguards against exploiting children, and a carbon tax), and responsive governments to put them in place. We can also demand that gear-makers like Apple design their products to last longer and to be more easily repaired, so that we throw them away less often.

I wish they'd ended the article here.

It was starting to feel like they were presenting a capitalism-coated silver bullet for environmental concerns, and right after they pulled up from that...they suggested that capitalism is going to solve environmental concerns in developing nations. I'm glad this article largely stuck to describing a phenomenon and not telling us to stake our future on it, but the line "...I predict that this Enlightenment will spread from the US and other rich countries to low-income parts of the world, and we’ll finally enter a stable and healthy relationship with the whole Earth." is just...Odd to me. Maybe I'm misreading it, but if they're claiming that market forces alone are going to be the leading force in solving climate change, I have to express my doubts.

Thanks for sharing, though! I liked this article a lot, my complaint notwithstanding.