Such a "speed limit" is an unfathomably bad idea, in every way, and moreover is a violation of fundamental human rights. I deeply oppose it. That is all.
I am not sure if you are insulting everyone who reads your point, or your own ability to communicate.
But maybe interpret the ideas less as a dichotomy you can't untangle and so must reject, which is a fragile place to reason from, and instead identify what are good points, what are not, and improve upon either.
Because there is certainly a great deal of truth to the problems being addressed.
In the USA the national speed limit was implemented by Richard Nixon in response to the oil crisis of 1973. The motive was to reduce energy consumption, not to reduce fatalities.
Nowadays calling something "a violation of fundamental human rights" often really just means "I really don't like it."
To be clear I'm not necessarily agreeing with the idea, but to be fair, there's more to it than you're suggesting.
They also don't particularly drive up the cost of energy any more than any other phenomenon in human society that uses energy, and the right solution to this is to build more power generation capacity, which is something we should be doing anyway because abundant energy is the foundation of all human prosperity.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/epa-to-... [2] https://www.wyomingnews.com/news/local_news/cheyenne-bopu-tr...
As for energy: honestly I agree with you that the solution is to build more power generation capacity, but that doesn't change the fact that in the meantime energy prices are already increasing substantially in many areas because of data centers [3].
[3] https://www.eenews.net/articles/data-centers-drive-76-surge-...
At a certain level of compute you need specialized infrastructure -- such as a purpose-built datacenter -- for the energy needs (and really, I think the stronger argument to be made here is about energy, not raw speed, and where the argument might fall apart is the historical fact that compute tends to become more energy-efficient over time).
Not sure whether the breathing/murder analogy is apt, but I get where you're coming from and I would probably agree that a blanket restriction on computer speed wouldn't be appropriate.
The linked article from 1973 is very strange to read in 2026 and honestly it's hard to take seriously. It seems to actually argue that China and India should stop developing because development encourages dependence on energy. It says that machines are slaves that modern people are required to master?
The speed equity discussed in the linked paper has actually increased significantly as well. More people have cars, and more people can afford plane trips, and bicycle infrastructure is better all over the nation (the world, probably) compared to 1973. I agree with the general principle that cities should encourage diverse development so more people can choose not to use cars if they want, or if they don't have access to a car. In the paper, this would be achieved by somehow state limiting the amount of energy people would be able to consume per capita. I'm glad that world didn't come to pass.
Basically it sounds like the point of view of the article is that at some point the state should tell people they're not allowed to try to make a certain process more efficient in terms of time or resources, because that might drive demand for better productivity, which would be bad because it drives us further from nature and community. Some of the points intersect with beliefs I hold, but I strongly oppose this way of going about it.
In computing, waiting kills (indirectly, by wasting time). Speed is life.
Some roads have minimum speed limits. If we're talking about limits, that's the kind of limit we want.
The softsynth soundtrack includes lyrics and one of them is "we slow down" which I always interpreted as a kind of demoscener's lament since making things go fast is sorta the whole point!
https://youtu.be/fngv1dCFrdo?si=tR-1uQ4vKIPLHZu3
I am not arguing for either side of the fastness debate, while I certainly adore fast computers I don't like the mental image of our computers all blazing away doing stuff mainly humans care about, while the the world 'outside' is steadily getting hotter and more polluted.
Self-imposable speed limits like screen time limits and blocking services and proxies do exist already and certainly could reduce overall non-physical harm if imposed on everyone - but we struggle as a species to agree on the impact of non-bodily harms.
How much faster should an ‚automated thinking‘ than a ‚manual thinking‘ be (allowed to be)?