By Moore's Law, computers have increased in speed roughly 1 million-fold in 50 years. Where are the gains?
I'd argue it's the users.
The Solow Paradox is an observation in economics, that "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics", named after Robert Solow, who coined it in 1987.
The question comes up in a news item that Chrome's update to its search/navigation "omnibox" reduced root DNS server loads by 40%, posted here by @Phil Stracchino.
Some see that as wasteful. It's an interesting trade between UI/UX simplicity and technical load.
If you think about the past ... dunno, 50 years ... of computer interface design, it's virtually all been a trade-off between those two factors. And the main gain of the million-fold increase in raw compute capacity since 1971 has been to a rough approximation, a million-fold increase in the number of computer users.
Reality is a bit more complex: there are numerous threshold effects of cost, capabilities, compute power, memory, storage, and networking capability, as well as "parasitic" but financially-significant roles such as advertising and surveillance, which pay many of the bills these days.
And there's some argument that the Solow Paradox merely measured a lag in response as new processes and businesses formed to take advantage of compute power, though ... well, I may have more to say on that. You can though see similar patterns with earlier periods of power- and transmission-related technologies in steam and electricity, where initial adaptations aped earlier equivalents, and it wasn't until factories and processes were restructured to take advantage of the specific benefits of the novel technologies that benefits emerged, this taking several decades.
In the case of computers, a significant aspect may well be the fact that end user computer skills vary tremendously and are overwhelming exceedingly poor, as Jacob Nielsen's commentary on an OECD large-scale multi-nation study. Over half the population, and over 2/3 in most surveyed industrialised countries, have poor, "below poor", or no computer skills at all.
And if you want them to make use of digitial technology, it's a heck of a lot easier to move the devices and tools to their level then them to those of the tools. Including by combining search and navigation inputs in a browser used by billions of souls. It's the tyranny of the minimum viable user.
If you want to know where compute power's gone, look at the users.
