What you're describing is a fundamental theme of engineering during the last half-century: Instead of trying for ever-more-precise manufacturing of mechanisms, just slap 'em together with loose tolerances and add cheap electronics to make the mechanism behave as if it were made to precise tolerances. You said it: "Why CALCULATE the answer, when you can VARY the solution to fit in real-time" describes the entire philosophy of sidestepping the need for predetermined perfection by using digital compensation instead.

A DVD player is a fine example. Imagine trying to make a player with a static mechanism to a tolerance fine enough to read tracks at micron spacing on a disc; and imagine having to manufacture the discs to those tolerances. Without digital feedback and positioning electronics the players would cost $half a million, and the discs would cost $tens of thousands. But build in $1 worth of cheap electronics, and shazaam! $10 players and $.10 discs.

During the same period, starting 30-40 years ago, people started making dire predictions of disaster ahead, based on an equation too simple to have been wrong: finite_resources / expanding_population = smaller_piece_of_the_pie. People who think that the predictions were wrong are overlooking the real reason we're still here: We've learned to do more with those smaller pieces of pie, primarily because digital technology has given us better computational tools and better manufacturing abilities, leading to increased efficiency in food production and energy consumption and resource allocation and just about every other area of life.

The question is, can we keep it up indefinitely? Or have we just postponed the day of reckoning? Will we hit the wall later this century? Interesting that many people are expressing a quasi-religious belief in a "Singularity" forecast for mid-century, when all the curves go vertical or horizontal and we effectively have infinite (virtual) resources to work with. I think that the Singularity religion is based on the recognition that if we don't achieve the efficiencies it implies, we won't make it.