Comment by com2kid

> but all things considered negligible impact on total productivity or the physical economy.

It is obscenely hard to measure those sorts of things.

OK, here is one example.

It used to be that engineers (the physical kind, not the software kind) had their own secretaries to manage meetings and fetch documents.

Those secretaries are all out of work now, replaced by Outlook and PDFs.

Modern farms are wired with thousands upon thousands of IOT sensors, precisely controlling every aspect of the fields and crops. Soil is maintained in perfectly ideal conditions. The internet is what made this possible.

The Internet has allowed for individuals to easily trade stocks, which has had who knows how large of an impact on the economy, but I am willing to guess it isn't a small one.

The Internet also enabled all sorts of algorithmic trading to pop up.

Television is of course a huge source of economic output in its own right.

6.9% of the US GDP is Media and Entertainment, not sure if that includes video games or not.

The tech industry is at least 10% of the US GDP, remove the Internet and that drops dramatically.