The two sides of post-industrial progress

Sometimes, we forget the pace of progress over the last couple of decades (and over the last ~60 years as well).

These are from the 2010 presentation. It was obviously pitched as a cool breakthrough deal. Now you won’t find a device or data plan with that kind of poor offering, and a YouTube app alone is 300 Mb. In one’s lifetime, we have gone from an isolation both indoors and outdoors to global connectivity almost everywhere; from communicating with giant computers via punched cards to on-device LLMs that you can talk to vocally; from waiting minutes for an image to upload to grabbing the entire Wikipedia in less than half an hour.

But the pace has its downsides. The swing to full-on tech approach instead of cross-pollination of tech and liberal arts brings a dystopian, heartless and wicked landscape. Quantity over quality; bending the user instead of tailoring the product; the rise of cheap and mediocre instead of sophisticated and pricey; mass production over handcraft.

We've been through these processes before. It was called the Industrial Revolution. Now, it's happening to information rather than goods.