By now, we live in a world where technology is less about meeting human needs and more about outpacing them. It’s progress at full throttle, barreling ahead long after the passengers stopped asking for more speed.

The Case of the Supercar Nobody Needs

Consider the automobile. A century ago, the Ford Model T’s 20 horsepower was enough to liberate entire generations, to reconfigure cities, and to redefine freedom. Today, you can walk into a showroom and buy a car with 1,000 horsepower, capable of catapulting itself down a track faster than fighter jets once left the runway. Engineers predict that with electric drivetrains, 10,000 horsepower might one day be attainable at consumer prices.

But then comes the awkward question: why?

On public roads, 250 horsepower is already sufficient to break the law at every green light. Tires, brakes, speed limits, and the fragile human body place boundaries horsepower cannot transcend. Beyond a certain point, each incremental gain in speed is not a marvel of progress but an act of theater. It’s horsepower for the spec sheet, not horsepower for the driver.

The Same Story in Our Pockets

Cars aren’t the only example. The same excess hums away inside our laptops and smartphones. A mid-tier computer from 2015 can still handle word processing, email, and video streaming—the digital diet of most households. Yet in 2025, budget laptops carry chips that rival Cold War supercomputers. Smartphones boast processors designed for gaming, artificial intelligence, and cinematic video capture. And what do we use them for? Scrolling Instagram, recording the family dog, and arguing with strangers online.

Internet connections follow the same arc. Gigabit fiber pours into suburban living rooms, but the average user employs it to watch Netflix—which streams perfectly well on a fraction of that bandwidth. For most people, the “speed” revolution isn’t liberation, it’s redundancy.

We are, in effect, driving Formula 1 cars to the grocery store.

Why Keep Chasing the Horizon?

If so much of this is wasted, why does industry keep pushing? Partly because marketing runs on numbers. A car advertised at 10,000 horsepower is easier to sell than one praised for long-term reliability. A phone with five cameras moves units more easily than one with just one really good camera.

Partly because specialized markets need the frontier. A handful of scientists, filmmakers, or engineers actually exploit the bleeding edge, and their demands pull the consumer market along with them.

And partly because progress has become its own cultural value. Faster, bigger, better—it feels like victory, even if we don’t know what we’re winning.

The Limits of Human Beings

The truth is that the bottleneck is not silicon or steel. It is us.

Human reflexes can’t adapt to 0–60 in 1.2 seconds. Our eyes don’t discern the leap from 8K to 16K resolution. Our hands will never type fast enough to make full use of a 100-core processor. We reach a point where the technology does not extend human capacity but embarrasses it, mocking our soft biological limits with its cold surplus of potential.

And then, of course, there is the absurdity: our phones contain more computational muscle than NASA had for the Apollo program, and most of us use that power to share memes.

The Endgame of Progress Theater

So where does this leave us? With a paradox. On one hand, surplus technology creates the conditions for tomorrow’s breakthroughs. Overpowered home computers in the 1990s enabled the web, gaming, and multimedia revolutions. Today’s “overkill” may be the soil from which future revolutions grow.

But on the other hand, when nearly every corner of life is saturated with more capability than we can or will ever use, progress becomes spectacle. It becomes a treadmill—advancing for the sake of advancement.

At some point, the question isn’t whether we can build it. It’s whether we should.

A Call for Rethinking “Enough”

Perhaps the more radical idea is that we stop fetishizing “more” and start thinking seriously about “enough.” What would it mean to design cars, computers, and networks not around abstract maximums but around human realities? What if the next frontier was not horsepower or processor cycles but durability, sustainability, and human well-being?

Because technology has already outrun us. The chase for the next leap is still exhilarating, but the race is long since detached from the needs of its spectators.

And maybe the bravest thing we could do now is step off the track.