I feel like people have never been not talking about it. I probably should have tossed in a reference to Heidegger & his focus on 'instrumentality' etc, too.

But the thing is.. how do they say it? "Money talks, bullshit walks?"

People follow what fills their stomach. And mechanization/automation/computation, it does that in spades. I mean... I dropped out of my philosophy major decades ago to go do the More Fun To Compute thing... My bank account shows it.

In any case... the first major uses of computers were for war. The next, for automation in commerce and finance. That's what computers are really for.