I'm not sure, were you contradicting me in the first place? I just thought your point was a bit cynical and I'm giving you my more positive spin on it.

I'm more agreeing with gkoberger and davidw. I actually do really like that we have the ability to dig deeper and that this depth is far more accessible than ever before. I agree, this is a huge success and we should be proud of this.

But after acknowledging this you just said that most people want to be lazy. Which is something I was actually agreeing with. Though, I guess I should add that I don't think people are doing that so much because they are lazy by nature but rather that they are overwhelmed. There's definitely a faster pace these days and less time given to have fun and be creative. One might say that it's work and work isn't meant to be fun, but this is mental work and critically, it is creative work. In those domains, "fun" is crucial to progress. It is more a description of exploration and problem solving. If we're all just "wanting to go to the pub and watch TV" (nothing wrong with that) then we'll just implement the quickest dirtiest solution to get things done. I think this can work in the short run but is ineffective in the long run. A little shortcut here and there isn't a big deal, but if you do that every day, every week, every year, those things add up. They are no longer little shortcuts, but a labyrinth. Instead of creating shortcuts, people are actually just navigating this labyrinth they made. It's the difference between being lazy by sitting on the couch all day and being lazy by "work smarter, not harder."

My main concern is with the environment we've created these days. It's the "free time" that davidw mentions. As several people have mentioned, things shifted towards money. My honest belief is that by focusing too much on money we've actually given up on a lot of potential profits. Take Apple. Instead of thinking different and trying new things, they've really mostly concentrated on making things smaller and thinner. That's good and all, but honestly, I'd more than happily have a thicker laptop to give my screen and keyboard more clearance. It's just so fucking difficult to avoid those smudge marks on my screen. We take less risks because we're profit focused. The risks just seem far riskier than they are. We've created walled gardens, which undermine what made the computer and smartphone so successful in the first place! (The ability to program them!) We hyper fixate on spreadsheets. We dismiss our powerusers because they are small in quantity, ignoring the role that they play in the ecosystem. In every ecosystem it is a small portion that does the most. Everything is just so myopic.

I'd agree that all these problems existed to some extent. But what the difference now is scale. I think what changed is the population of the developers. In "the old days" there was a good balance between the coding monkeys and business monkeys, where they pushed back against one another. The business people couldn't do it without the coders and the coders could do it without the business people, but were more effective with them. But I think these days the business monkeys just took over and dominated. The paradigm shifted from wanting to build good products and being happy to get rich while doing so to focusing on the getting rich part. We lost the balance. I think people are still creative, but I think we do not give them room to breathe, I think we do not give them enough room to take their chances. In some ways things are far easier than they've ever been, but in many ways they're also far harder. So are we measuring success by the fact that we have multiple trillion dollar companies, something never seen in 2010, or are we measuring success by the number of products and technologies that have changed peoples' lives. We made Android, iPhone, Maps, YouTube, Twitch, WiFi, Bluetooth, and so much more in just such a short time. But in (more than) that same timeframe, what innovations have we made? There's been some good leaps, don't get me wrong, but even AI is only a small portion of that. During most of that time we saw more vaporware than actual products. For the love of god, there's bitcoin billionaires. Love or hate crypto, it hasn't changed the world in a huge way.

/rant