Comment by jdietrich
15 hours ago
The electrical telegraph was integral to the growth and consolidation of the British Empire. Britain acquired more colonies and held on to them for longer than the other European powers partly due to its naval might, but also due to far superior bureaucratic and communications technology.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying.
Technology can be quite useful directly and have significant second order effect, hype is about the second order effects being overblown. Second order effects are difficult to predict when something is actually novel, will LLM’s make programming obsolete is harder to answer in 2023 than 2063.
Home automation like dishwashers really did meaningfully impact how much effort was needed to keep a home livable, but we didn’t predict the kind of helicopter parenting that happened because of more free time especially after smaller families became common. Thus a great majority of incorrect predictions where just hype.
The faster new technology becomes widespread the harder it is to predict those second order effects and thus more hype you see.