[goatlover]

When someone says a technology completely changed society, I think of the hypothetical singularity that Kurzweil and company predict, where it's basically impossible for us to predict what the future looks like after. But when you look back at the world before the rise of the web and then smartphones, it's just taking preexisting technologies and making them available in more mobile formats. TV, radio, satellite and computers existed before then (1968 mother of all demos had word processing, hypertext, networking, online video). And some people did more or less foresee what we've done online since.

We still burn fossil fuels to a large extent, still drive but not fly cars, still live on Earth not in space, still die of the same causes, etc.

I watch a long cargo train that looks like it's form the 80s go by and wonder how much the internet changed cargo hauling. I'm sure with the logistics the internet made things a lot more efficient, but the actual hauling is not much different. It's not like we teleport things around now. You can order online instead of out of a catalog, but brick stores remain. You can read digital books, but still plenty of printed materials, bookstores, libraries.