[dcx]

Do you remember life before iPhones? Before Google and universal knowledge, YouTube guides on every subject under the sun, Microsoft Excel, personal computers, international video calls, remote work? (Plus the indirect benefits to you economically from every industry adopting the above)

The world has added 3.4 billion people since 1980. We're in a life-or-death struggle for carrying capacity, so daily life naturally gets worse over time. It's easy to pin that on the whipping boy of the day.

There's no question that the next generation of technology has come with deep, systemic issues. But on balance the existence of these companies has clearly made the entire world better and brighter.

One case study - the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people. A pessimistic estimate for total deaths from COVID-19 after the vaccine(s) are fully rolled out might be 10 million. There are 4.3x more people in the world today. Disinformation is absolutely killing people. But how many more lives might our industry be credited with saving?

[randomsearch]

Totes agree with the “yeah but actually tech companies have done amazing things” argument but do you ever wonder why so many examples are now quite old? I mean I was raving about Google in 2001 and here we are near 20 years later saying how great their impact on search is...

[dcx]

Looking at release dates might not be the best way to frame this. It took decades before the full impact of the automobile was felt, and there were huge leaps in tech during that period too. We're in a different world today from when the first iPhone came out.

But also, I have a feeling like we're in the process of building up the activation energy for the next major wave of tangibly world-changing tech (AI, robotics, quantum computing?). I suspect the change in pace is related to the slowing of Moore's Law.