I mostly agree with this piece. There's lots of room for optimization still so we might see a temporary drop in the energy consumption of those systems. That said, longer term energy consumption is indeed the main leverage to improve performance of those systems. It can only get us so far, so new techniques will be needed. Hence why my position is that we'll come back to symbolic approaches at some point, there's a clear challenge at interfacing both worlds.

Excellent satire, it summaries the situation quite well.

Maybe at some point the big providers will get the message and their scrapers will finally respect robots.txt? Let's hope so.