What I'm speaking of is not 20 years from now, but 500. When we've moved past the banal, when people have assimilated instant communication but have also learned the preciousness of time and the negative long term effects of information overload. In a way, a bit like how we quickly moved past custom ringtones, but on a much grander scale. Programming is relatively novel nowawadays. It won't be in 500 years, it will just be like a hammer.
- making money through ads.
- enabling people to live their shallow ego trips on fb / ig / whatever is used these days. (influencers, &c.)
- drown people in endless entertainment to make their work/sleep cycle tolerable.
None of this is helping society is a whole, but, sure we have nice electric cars 90% of the population can't afford and we'll soon send rocket to Mars.
Do we need $2.6k foldable phone ? pizza delivery drones ? same day delivery ? slaves delivering food through apps like deliveroo ? Is that the best we can do with tech today ? Or is it just enabling our mindless consume / produce cycle with no end goal ? For every meaningful tech advance we have 10 startups raising millions to press a fruit bag [0] or be a rental agency [1]. It's like a sad and lame black mirror episode.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-s...