[neogodless]

Your task is to keep your house at a steady 70F when you're there, and 55F when you're not. Can you do this task more quickly now than you could 20 years ago?

Your task is to assess your bills and financial health, including outstanding balances, account balances, interest rates and dividends returned.

Your task is to determine the weather forecast for this afternoon.

Your task is to turn on your computer and download a full-length film.

Your task is to design, implement and deploy a data-driven application with a web UI. You must find and allocate hosting. The UI must validate user entries and provide feedback.

Can you give some examples of tasks that take longer to do today?

[swasheck]

Your task is to create a lasting representation of the struggle and beauty and plight of the human race.

Your task is to bring meaningful, sustainable, and relevant hope and quality of life improvement to society.

We can get more low-value tasks per unit of time now, thanks to technology. Unfortunately, there's something of our essential humanity that tech has robbed.

We pay lip service to the fact that tech has made these tasks easier and faster to do and that we are now freed to use more time engaging meaningful life. Instead, we are either so information weary, addicted to tech, or just disconnected from that essence that we don't use this free time well.

We're tired, lazy, disconnected, and addicted. Our ability to think critically across a range of disciplines has been broadly compromised.

So I'd rather just keep my thermostat at 67, balance my ledgers manually, plan for seasonally appropriate weather and adapt to change, go to the theater with my family and/or friends, and maybe write a book.

The only compelling application of technology is synchronizing financial assessments. Otherwise, I think I'd be happier if I wasn't addicted.

[sertorius]

> Your task is to create a lasting representation of the struggle and beauty and plight of the human race. > Your task is to bring meaningful, sustainable, and relevant hope and quality of life improvement to society.

I'd be curious as to your opinion on the shape of this curve in history. Did we peak at some date in history? Perpetual downward slope? Perpetual upward slope?

[saltcured]

> Your task is to create a lasting representation of the struggle and beauty and plight of the human race.

Compared to 20+ years ago, I think there is more popular appreciation for "meta" and pervasive performance art, which is a definite productivity booster for poets at heart. The technology isn't needed for writing, but it has forged an audience...

You may argue that you asked for "lasting" representation, and today's market is anything but. But, that's in fact part of the beauty and plight.

[muzani]

I think it's more that there's so many distractions now that a lot of people spend the whole day doing practically nothing.

Maybe in the past, it would take a whole night to do taxes. Today it would still take the whole night to do taxes, but three quarters of that time is going down the rabbit hole of googling tax exemptions, etc.

[Infernal]

So presumably you’re able to optimize better given the same amount of time? That feels like a productivity increase to my way of thinking.

[gdubs]

Robert Gordon wrote a whole book on this (“The Rise and Fall of American Growth”), and I think he’d answer your list by asking if any of those items were as transformative as going from not having electricity, to having electricity; not having indoor plumbing, to having indoor plumbing; not having a clothes washer, to having a clothes washer...

It used to take our family an hour or two to go to the video store, pick out a movie, return home — but we typically had fun doing it.

My dad got some weird pleasure out of owning the thermostat and telling us not to touch it.

Arguably people are better off if they can’t check out their investments all the time, and tax prep seems to suck just as much now as it did back then.

But honestly, yes — our digital tools are generally way faster and more advanced than they were a decade ago. I can do in an hour in Swift what would take me all day in Flash. But I’m also 10X more competent now, so it’s hard to directly compare. And I sure do spend a lot of time making sure I have the right dependencies installed any time I want to try running one of the shiny, new, JavaScript frameworks.

The real question, for me, is how distracted are we? If there have been productivity gains from technological advances, are those improvements undercut by our collective inability to focus on work for meaningful amounts of time?

[simonsarris]

Your task is to write a novel like Moby Dick.

I suspect there are not as many people with the concentration to do so as there used to be. I think that's what OP is getting at.

[maxerickson]

A smaller percentage perhaps.

There's almost certainly more people with the time and concentration to write a novel than there has ever previously been.

[megaman22]

> Your task is to keep your house at a steady 70F when you're there, and 55F when you're not. Can you do this task more quickly now than you could 20 years ago?

I can, but I still have an old, analog thermostat that I could have had 20 years ago. Just turning the dial every time is, in my experience, much easier than fussing and babysitting a "smart" thermostat.

[neogodless]

I only have experience with the "not very smart" programmable thermostats, which I adore. I've had one for over a decade with no issues. When I bought another house, it was one of the first things I put in. It's "slightly" easier (lower effort) to program it once and never touch it again (except for "exceptions") then to try to remember each time I move from zone to zone or go to work. Definitely pays for itself in net lower energy (unless you're super diligent yourself, which I am not!)

[ehnto]

Imagine every switch in your house was just a screen, you had to swipe to unlock it, and then find the light switch you're standing at in a list of all switches in the house. That would be a nightmare.

[quantumhobbit]

How about, your task is to program a thermostat, but also keep the thermostat from mining bitcoins because an npm module you downloaded has been compromised.