If the rapid obsolescence cycle of chip fabs end (ie, Moore's law ends and process nodes stop getting smaller so there's no reason to change processes), it will kick off a golden age of ASICs and a Cambrian explosion of chip diversity and software design tool progress.
You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be.
Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.
You can produce fully custom chips now but at any reasonable cost you have to use decade-old gate sizes making it hard to compete with general purpose parts. The lack of a busy market feeds back into itself making every step of the process more tricky and expensive than it needs to be.
Imagine the change from massive recording studio engineering to 'a laptop with pro tools' only in silicon instead of music.