[azan_]

That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering in e.g. medicine. Modern drug discovery would be impossible without advances in computation, and we are getting breakthrough drugs all the time thanks to that.

> We could already telegraph someone across Atlantic, we could extract knowledge in library, we could do accounting. The speedup is small compared to horses vs steam power for transportation for example.

The speedup is much larger than horses vs steam power. How much time would it take you to find some scientific article if your library did not stock journal it was published in? You'd have to write request to get that issue and then wait few weeks before it arrives. Now you can get it basically instantly.

[TacticalCoder]

> That's very myopic view. The gains by the rise of IT have been staggering ...

You can't make people who have basically been, their entire lives, coding variations of JavaScript "punch the monkey" abusive ads understand the impact the Internet had on the world.

[mahkeiro]

I wonder if people saying this really had an active life before Internet because if you do the change is so massive that it’s difficult to comprehend.

[ernst_klim]

I did live before internet bc widespread internet came quite late to my country, and I must say it wasn't all that different. Dating, job search and social interactions were actually easier and more pleasant.

[darkerside]

Clearly written by someone who's never lived without steam power (semi tongue in cheek).

But seriously, your ability to expediently research just doesn't compare to the ability to ship a metric ton of freight across the country without marshalling an army of people for months on end. As one example.

[sususuuss]

There is more to pushing freight than just turning the ignition key.

The complexity of supply-chains is overwhelming. Your fancy boat or train needs a boatload (!) of grease, oils, spare parts, maintenance, logs, not to mention fuel, accounting, insurance, the list is endless and it’s all either fully enabled by or extraordinarily simplified by digital networks.