>We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable,

It seems Dijkstra is describing potential calability of LLM model trained on published collective human knowledge enabled by the Internet

>and, in view of the history of mankind, it may not be overly pessimistic to guess that to do the job well enough would require again a few thousand years

Since the article was written in 1978 (about 50 years ago) and from the time the computing resources of CPU and RAM has increased exponentially until the LLM first appeared in 2020s, it seems the thousand of years prediction is merely several decades accelerated by the rapid advances of computer and communication systems technology spearheaded by companies like Nvidia.