How is it possible to index the entire Internet's content, and perform nontrivial searches fast enough that a page of hits can be rendered as the searcher types? That may work on a small scale, but scaling up you run into complexity barriers. It's impossible in practice.
Oh, right, Google did it.
Your reasoning is exactly what the article criticizes: the notion of "that's impossible, don't bother" vs. "so what, let's do it anyway".
Our ability to handle complexity scales exponentially over time, and we're on a fast-rising part of the curve now; even if something is "impossible in practice" now, get started on the problem and predict at what point the industry _will_ have the technology to handle that level of complexity.
Hard != impossible.
Hard now != hard in the relevant future.
Oh, right, Google did it.
Your reasoning is exactly what the article criticizes: the notion of "that's impossible, don't bother" vs. "so what, let's do it anyway".
Our ability to handle complexity scales exponentially over time, and we're on a fast-rising part of the curve now; even if something is "impossible in practice" now, get started on the problem and predict at what point the industry _will_ have the technology to handle that level of complexity.
Hard != impossible. Hard now != hard in the relevant future.