While I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...

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estearum 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.

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smokel 5 hours ago | parent [-]

For all we know social media will emerge across another 6,000 year timeframe. I think we're going in circles :)

	▲	flufluflufluffy 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The point is that radio, then television, then internet, then smartphones, then AI, each one of which is as impactful on the world as the examples you gave, emerged within a couple hundred years ago years, rather than a couple thousand (and the last few within a couple decades).
	▲	bee_rider 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Breaking “social” up into networking (connecting to my friends: MySpace, old Facebook) and media (social-graph recommended content: TikTok, current Facebook mostly)… the former might stick around. But the latter seems pretty vulnerable to learning model generated content, right? Social media might not exist in a couple decades or might be seen as sort of primitive stepping-stone on the path to algorithmically-generated entertainment media. Which will probably be quite bad, but then, influencer-generated entertainment media was quite bad, so maybe we won’t be too much worse off.

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wat10000 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

All of those things changed some individual lives I the short term, and changed societies in the long term. But they did not change societies in the short term. The average life in the decades before the printing press was pretty much the same as in the decades after. Inventions that massively altered entire societies within a human lifespan of their invention are pretty new. Maybe somebody more familiar with the history of technology can correct me, but I can’t think of anything like that before the steam engine.