Let's just get back to tech. In the 1980s a 4mhz computer with 360k floppy disks and cga monitor cost about 2500 bucks... Today, you have a phone in your pocket exponentially faster and smaller - all in a few decades.
The apple watch - has 100s of times more compute/storage and resolution than that computer... and some of those watches have 4g / gps and things we could have only dreamed about.
In the late 90s, we used to watch "videos" in "realplayer" in a 1" block.. 20 years later, we're streaming 4k on demand on ever device in a home across wifi networks and gigabit connections to our homes.
It wasn't that long ago most of the world was excited about 56k
The only thing that's happening, is you seem hellbent on taking the science/engineering marvels of our generation for granted.
We could go on and on but nothing would change your apparent disdain for the future
And what has all that computational improvement bought?
Modest improvements in communications (the bulk of which are taken up by ... decidedly non-critical messages). Adtech. Another few days on the long-term weather forecast. Pervasive Panopticon surveillance, both capitalist and state, largely symbiotic. Random death from the sky if you happen to be brown-skinned.
For millionsfold increases in CPU power, and billionsfold increases in the actual number of CPUs available.
You are using a platform that can distribute that sentence to a majority of the human population, at a marginal cost that rounds to 0, in less time than it would take a human to type it.
Another few days on the weather forecast for heavily populated areas that already have a team of forecasters on staff. For the rest of the earth, we have enabled forecasts to exist at all. in 1980, if I wanted the forecast for a remote spot on earth the answer was "hire a meteorologist". Now I can have a reasonably accurate forecast sent to me hourly via a satellite constellation for a single digit percentage of the cost of hiring a meteorologist. This has HUGE implications for logistics, agriculture scientific research, etc...
Surveillance and death from the sky? The west has had no problem spying on citizens since the 1930s, and randomly killing people in less developed civilizations is a centuries long tradition for the west. All technologies have their downsides. Much like computing, metallurgy is one of the core technologies behind warfare (modern guns don't exist without steel, planes without aluminum, etc...).
Niche artists and businesses can find an audience using the internet (using ad tech, I'll note). Lives are so routinely saved by cell phone technology, that we don't even bother noting the role that technology plays. I can use google translate to have a real time conversation with a stranger on the other side of the earth without having to worry about language. I taught myself how to design PCBs and had a prototype run made by a factory in a country that I've never been to, in less than a month.
The effects of computer technology are so ubiquitous that I think they are almost invisible
Broadcast communications is an inherently rivalrous space, and the ability for any one person to reach others means of necessity that they are preempting anyone else from doing so. Given present population and life expectancy, the amount of time that can be equitably granted any individual on Earth by others is ... a small fraction of a second. The likelihood that any of my online utterances is seen by more than a few hundreds of people is very slight. I'd have a similar audience at any crowded city street corner, or on a university quadrangle.
Worse, the existence of such a channel incentivises low-value ways to fill it. Advertising, robocalls, spam, phishing attempts, and fraud. It's somewhat enlightening to look over the Greek and Roman pantheon to realise that Fama was interested only in trumpeting the pronouncements of the gods, not considering their value or veracity, and that Mercury was the god not only of messengers, but of tricksters and thieves. Herbert Melville's The Confidence Man, from which the modern term derives, was set on the first great superhighway of the United States, the Mississippi River.
Improvements in communications technology have much the same effect has handing out party favours to a room full of five-year-olds. Communications and intelligence isn't improved, though the noise floor is considerably raised.
My point isn't that a few days' additional improvement on weather forecasts have no value. It is that in order to achieve this, MILLIONS OF TIMES increases in computer power are necessary. Which is to say that information-processing advances of an extreme degree deliver very, very modest additional benefits.
Niche artists and businesses used to find an audience the old-fasioned way: locally, because of a phenomenon known as "friction". It cost too much to move goods (or audiences) long distances, so provisioning was local. It wasn't until the rise of the factory system, mechanised transportation, branding, and advertising, that it became possible to sell goods over a range of more than a few villages or towns (with rare exceptions). The consequence now is that:
- Every manufacturer of a durable good is competing on a global basis, and production has a strong tendency to shift to where labour and environmental regulations can be most heavily suppressed.
- Ephemeral production, as with software, video entertainment, music, fashion, banking, and propaganda centralises to where the non-ephemeralisable components of production are most suitably concentrated, giving rise to toponymic global centres (with possible variations based on language, culture, and regulation or legal jurisdictions): Hollywood and Bollywood, Nashville and Motown, Silicon Valley, New York / London / Frankfurt / Tokyo / Shanghai, Milan and Paris, Moscow and Macedonia.
Cellphones are so gunked with junk calls that actual lost hikers will ignore incoming calls from unknown numbers, a problem communications service providers have seen coming for years. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383)
I'm not saying that there are no benefits. But that there are also costs and consequences and counterveiling trends, and that many of the so-called gains have been offeset by losses either in the same domain or elsewhere.
An understanding of human impact on climate change
Discovery of extra-solar planets (and even potentially an extra-galactic one)
Self-driving taxis (waymo, in Phoenix)
CGI in movies (and: cgi-movies) revolutionising entertainment
Scientific advances (simulations in physics, astronomy, biomedicine; formal verification in CS)
untold quality of life improvements (eg cars, apps that translate signs/menus,...)
Wrt cars: the chip shortage is reducing car production. That says something about how much modern cars need that computational power.
- Realisation of climate change puts additional constraints on human activity, it doesn't lift them. It's what I call a "hygiene factor", along with other realisations of unintended consequences of activities. Note that the constraints existed all along, we're just made aware of them at some point.
- Extrasolar planetary systems have virtually no practical impact for life on Earth. They represent an extension of understanding but not of means.
- Self-driving taxis ... are solving a wrong problem for most people. They don't solve transportation problems (congestion, cost, pollution, land-use), they are far more capital-intensive than increased land-density, walkable (or bikeable) cities, or mass-transit. They seem to exacerbate, not solve, inequality issues amongst both drivers and riders. There may be a slight safety improvement, but that remains theoretical rather than demonstrated. On every other touted benefit, ride-hailing / self-driving vehicles have failed to deliver.
- Movie CGI is an example of a technology with very minimal upside benefits and huge downside risks. The positives are ... making it easier to tell lies in entertainment. The negatives are ... making it easier to tell lies for any other cause at all: deepfakes, porn, fraud, spearphishing, propaganda, etc., etc., etc. There may be some benefits in situation / scenario modeling and simulation, though much of that seems to have military and offensive applications as well.
- Physics, astronomy, and medicine are all domains in which return to knowledge seems to fall rapidly. Basic mechanics gave us simple machines, chemistry and gas laws gave us our prime movers, steam engines, ICEs, and turbines. Electromagnetic experiments gave us generators, electric motors, and a wide range of electromechanical and electronic systems virtually all conceived of in the 19th century. Of quantum-based systems, the most widely used are probably LEDs, lasers (in information transmission and preservation), and photovoltaics. Returns to basic medical interventions (public health, nutrition, food quality, antisceptics) are vastly greater than those to acute interventions. And we can't even persuade a huge fraction of the population to practice basic hygiene and get a proved vaccine.
- Modern cars are dependent upon computational power. It is not necessary to use computational power in those cars, and vehicles lacking any electronics do in fact function. There are marginal at best improvements in performance and safety. Pollution controls (through improved real-time combustion tuning) is probably the largest impact. Note that the primary alternative to ICE-based automobiles are electric cars, themselves a development track abandoned over a century ago in favour of (at the time, and by badly flawed economic pricing functions) cheaper fossil-fueled internal combustion engines.
Meantime, pervasive problems exist in pollution (global warming from CO2 emissions, ozone from CFC releases, lead largely from use in motor fuels though also paint and other applications, other heavy metals, endocrine disruptors, plastics), environmental and ecosystem devastation (multiple causes), economic inequity, political imbalance, massive injustice, discrimination and genocide, epistemic warfare, and fundamentally, a failure to accept and act on the reality of limits to human expansion and progress.
Let's just get back to tech. In the 1980s a 4mhz computer with 360k floppy disks and cga monitor cost about 2500 bucks... Today, you have a phone in your pocket exponentially faster and smaller - all in a few decades.
The apple watch - has 100s of times more compute/storage and resolution than that computer... and some of those watches have 4g / gps and things we could have only dreamed about.
In the late 90s, we used to watch "videos" in "realplayer" in a 1" block.. 20 years later, we're streaming 4k on demand on ever device in a home across wifi networks and gigabit connections to our homes.
It wasn't that long ago most of the world was excited about 56k
The only thing that's happening, is you seem hellbent on taking the science/engineering marvels of our generation for granted.
We could go on and on but nothing would change your apparent disdain for the future