[snowedin]

I think there are real improvements made by the tech industry. For example cellular and smart phones are brand new and overall have improved quality of life and productivity.

But on the whole I think most of the "gains" made through big tech are marginal. Marginal specifically because either:

A.) New tech companies create products primarily to make the tech industry more productive at building/maintaining/deploying systems

B.) New tech companies provide a small amount of value over a preexisting industry and transfer the industry into the tech sector (e.g. Uber/Lyft) through "disruption"

As a result, the industry has provided less overall growth and improvement to society than its raw potential, and at the same time has consolidated wealth as much as it has created it.

Uber was originally supposed to be a commute-sharing app that reduced heavy reliance on vehicles, making a dramatically more efficient use of resources and time. When it came around to executing on this, the real value-making proposition was to transfer and capture an existing market (ride-hailing/taxi services).

My prescription for a fix would be to emphasize computer literacy in the school system, encouraging the entire 12K public school system to introduce the idea of self-automation as a problem solving pattern for the general population.

In two generations, every sector of the economy will apply automation within their own ranks to eek out efficiency, rather than relying on software developers in California to understand their day-to-day and make an app to "disrupt" their industry.

[shantly]

I have a suspicion that most application of computing and Internet technology, even in business, has in fact been neutral or somewhat negative in terms of productivity and, for humans, also for happiness, but some minority of the applications yield such huge gains (on both fronts) that it's an improvement overall and one can be fooled into thinking it's usually good, rather than usually bad but sometimes very good.