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Does Technology Ever Change Anything?
Why Silicon Valley hype is very misleading
Supposedly we live in an age of innovation in which every new startup is going to change the world forever. If you believe the breathless pundits, smartphone apps and video conferencing has changed humanity and “game-changers” are everywhere around us.
In reality, however, what’s interesting is how very little we’ve changed at all. In fact, it’s possible to argue that only a handful of new technologies have ever fundamentally changed the way we live.
The first breakthough technology, which occurred somewhere between 200,000 years ago and 1,700,000 year ago was fire. This enabled us to cook our food, which made consumption and digestion faster and easier as well as reducing the risk of food poisoning from rotting meat. Fire also provided warmth during cold seasons and may even have enabled many of our species to survive the most recent ice age.
Fire genuinely was a game-changing technology. From fire we ultimately were able to develop smelting, which gave us the bronze age and the iron age and all of our technological marvels today.
The next breakthrough technology was agriculture. When certain species of grass developed a genetic mutation around 11,000 years ago that caused the seed kernel to detach more…
