At the risk of going off on a tangent, your pessimism is unwarranted.
Consider, first of all, that we're having this discussion on a message board with participants from all over the world. That's a meaningful benefit of software.
I read both the original article and this discussion with a screen reader, because I'm visually impaired. I can also use a screen reader to read ebooks. Sure, I have enough sight that I could read regular print with a simple magnifier. But without software, my totally blind friends would have to wait for the things they want to read to be transcribed into braille, recorded, or read to them in person. This, to me, is a benefit of software that goes way beyond convenience.
Spend some time contemplating all of the ways that the modern surveillance state oppresses minorities, all of the drivers of income inequality (both domestically and globally), how few people actually benefit meaningfully from automation, and get back to me about how my "pessimism" is unwarranted. FFS, software has lowered the barrier to warfare so far we're bombing somewhere between five and ten (I can't even keep up) countries currently, and it isn't even generating column inches in the local paper.
Modern states deliver drastically higher standard of living, less oppression, and minuscule existential risk (i.e. total war, wholesale slaughter) compared to historical norms.
Read some history and get back to us on how the modern world is oppressive, violent, or impoverished compared to some bygone golden age.
It’s true that if you go back far enough we were all equal... because we were all peasant farmers.
I've listed observable deterioration in societal conditions attributable directly to software, and thus changes that have taken place over roughly the last 50 years. Are you asserting mass surveillance (for example) hasn't become a largely inescapable societal norm or that software doesn't provide the methods? In what way is "historical norms" before the advent of software in any way relevant to the discussion? To humor your strawman, please reconcile the phrase "miniscule existential risk" with the myriad existential threats to species survival the modern age presents that did not exist before the advent of computers.
If you believe that you're going to be sad when someone shows you a graph of income inequality over time. That oppression pre-dates software is not in question. Are you attempting to assert that modern surveillance and carceral state either don't benefit from software or are not examples of institutionalized oppression? You are, of course, aware that the US has the highest number (by count and % of population) of incarcerated citizens of any country on the planet, and that minorities are disproportionally targeted, right?
The surveilance works also in reverse. Black Lives Matter wouldnt be there if there wasnt the masses surveil the supressors.
Alot of technology benefits are non visible today- but imagine any nasty event- and notice how a lot of the implicit knowledge of a society would survive today- encoded in videos, automated tutorials and wikipedia articles.
And it even makes kind of sence. Investing into "Leaps" forward can fail in a thousand ways, investing into measure that prevent society from falling down completely and allow fast recoverys, well that is something that can become usefull a hundred times over.
Its like a dice where one in nth sides gives you a chance to leap forward - and 0.5*n of all sides have a chance you must step permanently back. Removing those sites of the dice from the scenario tree, is statistically OP though not really cool to watch.
The only thing currently not OP is how companys research is directed towards local optima. There are no big attempts to lift whole areas of endavours in feasability.
Actually, if i had the whole picture- i would guess that humanity is currently on some sort of golden path.
> Alot of technology benefits are non visible today- but imagine any nasty event- and notice how a lot of the implicit knowledge of a society would survive today- encoded in videos, automated tutorials and wikipedia articles.
Let's be fair here. If a nasty event caused us to lose power grids globally for a year, we'd lose 99% of that knowledge (preceded by mass starvation of high-double-digits of the western population). Digital data is fragile. Hard drives have lifetimes measured in years. Even optical and flash drives have practical lifetimes (in actual use) of under two decades. The whole thing works only because data is not at rest for long - it's get copied over all the time, as our economy pumps out hard drive after hard drive after hard drive (hell, the same thing applies to CPUs, RAM and displays these days). Everything is so tightly interwoven together, that it starts to resemble a living being - you can't pause it.
That's, BTW., the reason I strongly believe our global priority everywhere should be preservation and stabilization of the technological civilization we have. Itself, it's not rebootable - if it fails now, if we get kicked back to pre-industrial-evolution levels (through e.g. 3rd World War, or environmental collapse, or both), we'll be stuck in them for millenia to come, waiting for Earth to replenish all the easily accessible high-density energy sources, that are all gone now.
We are on a golden path, but it's a tightrope - we need to focus on balancing ourselves and getting to the other end, instead of getting distracted by random trivia and amplifying every single thing that is not exactly right for someone.
Consider, first of all, that we're having this discussion on a message board with participants from all over the world. That's a meaningful benefit of software.
I read both the original article and this discussion with a screen reader, because I'm visually impaired. I can also use a screen reader to read ebooks. Sure, I have enough sight that I could read regular print with a simple magnifier. But without software, my totally blind friends would have to wait for the things they want to read to be transcribed into braille, recorded, or read to them in person. This, to me, is a benefit of software that goes way beyond convenience.
I could go on, but this blog post by Bertrand Meyer responds to general pessimism about software better than I could: https://bertrandmeyer.com/2013/03/12/apocalypse-no-part-1/