Re:I no longer build software
by freewilly1040 on Monday September 21, 2020 @12:44PM
(#24545523)
The super rich framing isn't useful IMO, much of the advances in technology function to make things possible for people for whom that function was impossible for before.
> You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece!
Depends on who the "you" is. And choosing a super rich person as your point of reference is a pretty arbitrary choice (with underlying assumptions about society that are worth examining, I might add).
What I wanted to highlight, was that technology making something possible, that was previously impossible, is actually quite rare.
There really aren’t all that many innovations that come along and change the world in such a way that a time-traveller from the past, would need to learn an entirely new conceptual framework to understand how we do things now. Almost always, what we do now, maps in an obvious 1:1 way to what we used to do. Hailing a cab? You could hail a cab in Ancient Greece!
In fact, it’s pretty hard to think of genuinely-novel things humans only started doing in the last 100 years, due to some technological enabler. Playing single-player interactive story-games, maybe — even the progenitor of the medium, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, is AFAIK a 20th-century innovation.