it seems that sometimes the first clunky round of human+technology gives "everyman" what he wants, then only-technology provides for a tech-savy niche, and then finally the technology and automation get good enough to go back to giving people in general what they want.
so, i wouldn't say "welcome to the early 70's" is necessarily bad.
another example is when people used to mail their harddrives to external datacenters to back up. anyone could use that service! then we got a bunch of command line and self server backup options, which could be a pain in the butt even for people with some amount of tech-saviness. now we finally have user friendly "send your data to get backed up by someone/thing else" services such as dropbox and time machine.
haha, when the robots make our food we can say welcome to the European 1200's, where you (royalty) were served by serfs.
