You are making my point stronger rather than weaker: Aircraft have only become more efficient in the last 50 years or so and that's precisely the equivalent of better compilers and compression.
And the diminishing returns for computing are for the most part driven by the lack of investment in new ways of computing because we got so much for free. But once the free ride is over you can expect the research into efficiency to be picked up again because that will be the only field where real progress can be made. There have been a few half-assed (apologies to those involved, it was no doubt a ton of work) attempts at making computing fabrics and clockless machinery. And that's because by the time you have something working the scaling advantages have already overtaken your work and absolutely nobody is going to give up a working architecture for something unproven if it doesn't given an immediate return. Some pretty good ideas died like that.
And the diminishing returns for computing are for the most part driven by the lack of investment in new ways of computing because we got so much for free. But once the free ride is over you can expect the research into efficiency to be picked up again because that will be the only field where real progress can be made. There have been a few half-assed (apologies to those involved, it was no doubt a ton of work) attempts at making computing fabrics and clockless machinery. And that's because by the time you have something working the scaling advantages have already overtaken your work and absolutely nobody is going to give up a working architecture for something unproven if it doesn't given an immediate return. Some pretty good ideas died like that.
But I suspect their day will come.