A lot of it is about multiplier effects, which can be subtle. Google and Github make people better at their jobs (especially software engineers, who don't have to read horribly-written manuals for shitty commercial software, because they can now use excellent open-source tools and search for what they need). This speeds economic growth and innovation by making people more productive.
Multiplier-dom (for lack of a better word) used to be for managers and executives only (although at least a third to one-half are dividers in most companies). Executives and capitalism could claim that they were the real producers and movers of progress and that the workers, "mere" adders. were hangers-on (Randism) but that's no longer the case. Now software engineers can be multipliers without access to capital or bureaucratic installation into a managerial role.
Global economic growth is currently about 4% per year. That's the highest it's ever been, but there's no reason it can't be much higher-- possibly 20 or 30 percent per year. That seems radical, but in 1798 (Malthus) economic growth under 1%, and that (sub-1% global economic growth) had been the norm for eternity. Malthus was wrong mathematically in his assumption that economic growth was linear (even in pre-industrial times, the curve was exponential-- just a very slow exponential curve) but he was right about population increases outpacing economic growth and leading to disaster or war. That happened constantly in pre-industrial societies. It stopped happening in the developed world around 1850. Some time in the next two hundred years we'll probably see post-scarcity.
I, for one, would love to see a post-scarcity world. I don't care if I live to be 1000 years old, in the sense that if we don't eradicate scarcity I don't want to live past my natural ~75-100 (even for the rich, the with-scarcity existence is too crappy to justify more than a century in such a world in one incarnation) but a post-scarcity would be worth seeing. Technology is a chance to contribute, in some small way, to the overarching effort to see that through.
Multiplier-dom (for lack of a better word) used to be for managers and executives only (although at least a third to one-half are dividers in most companies). Executives and capitalism could claim that they were the real producers and movers of progress and that the workers, "mere" adders. were hangers-on (Randism) but that's no longer the case. Now software engineers can be multipliers without access to capital or bureaucratic installation into a managerial role.
Global economic growth is currently about 4% per year. That's the highest it's ever been, but there's no reason it can't be much higher-- possibly 20 or 30 percent per year. That seems radical, but in 1798 (Malthus) economic growth under 1%, and that (sub-1% global economic growth) had been the norm for eternity. Malthus was wrong mathematically in his assumption that economic growth was linear (even in pre-industrial times, the curve was exponential-- just a very slow exponential curve) but he was right about population increases outpacing economic growth and leading to disaster or war. That happened constantly in pre-industrial societies. It stopped happening in the developed world around 1850. Some time in the next two hundred years we'll probably see post-scarcity.
I, for one, would love to see a post-scarcity world. I don't care if I live to be 1000 years old, in the sense that if we don't eradicate scarcity I don't want to live past my natural ~75-100 (even for the rich, the with-scarcity existence is too crappy to justify more than a century in such a world in one incarnation) but a post-scarcity would be worth seeing. Technology is a chance to contribute, in some small way, to the overarching effort to see that through.