IMHO we've had only one material revolution from computing which offered the ability to move away from paper. For individuals and SMBs this was the spreadsheet, for larger organizations this was a centralized database with remote access. But after that I don't think we've seen a material improvement. Dumb terminals in the 80's gave just as much value to access data as their Windows GUI successors and then web/mobile. So aside from the spreadsheet I'd agree with the premise of this post, we're still not seeing a true computer revolution. It's mostly the same stuff with different interfaces.
In some ways we've gone backwards. The 80s green screen computers that my public library I had as a kid were really well-designed and efficient to use. The modern, web-based GUI of my public library today is not.
(Though I would say there's a gazillion ways we've gone forward. Videochat, youtube, twitter, and tiktok are all amazing things.)
Yeah you and another reply have a good point that real time and asynchronous video communication paired with ubiquitous cameras on our devices might also be the next game changer. If so it's still the first inning or relative beginning of seeing the impacts of that technology on society.
Sure office life is no tradie or farmer but personally I find i found i was doing slightly less walking when not in the office, I drove to the coffee shop instead of walking 400m round trip to my coffee shop of choice at the office 1 or 2 times a day and I lost the 15 minutes walk to the train station every day.
Computers and GUIs have radically reshaped video and music production. I'm sure there are other domains where has had similar impact, where reverting to a dumb terminal would not be possible, such as CAD applications.
The production tools may have changed drastically, but has the end product really improved? On might argue that music and movies produced before 1998 were a lot more engaging, nowadays movies and music are produced without obvious flaws, taking away character and making it all very bland.
Isn't that a slippery-slope argument or something?
Nothing in the history of life has changed fundamentally: Eat, reproduce, die. Your evaluation of the industry's products doesn't change the objective fact, that there is significant change enabled by computation.
What do you expect than? We humans got already advanced computation going on between our eyes. Pretty much nothing a computer can do, isn't to some extent already done by humans. What do you expect, if not just getting more efficient at tasks, than humans?
Not sure we can build something fundamentally more capable than human brains. And if so, can we recognize the leap?
