A view of technology:

Watch an old movie and notice the many improvements in economic productivity, standard of living, quality of life.

E.g.: To get salt, had to travel to the local village. For this had to saddle up or harness a horse or two. Now can get the salt delivered or eat in a restaurant or drive to the village on a smooth road in a car with HVAC.

Car tires used to wear out in about 15,000 miles and were so vulnerable to rupture that had to carry a spare and know where the bumper jack was and how to change a tire. Now can get 75,000 miles from a set of tires.

Ever mess with a carburetor and ignition breaker points? Now have electronic engine controls with fuel injection. So, less maintenance, better fuel economy, fewer oil changes, longer engine life.

It goes on this way for cars and transportation more generally.

See how houses were built: Saws, hammers, and plaster. Now have electric saws, studs, beams, and panels already cut to size, and wall board. E.g., I had some wood to cut, with a saw got halfway through the first cut, then rushed out and got a circle saw, zip, zoom, cut all the pieces and they look really nice. Needed to drill some 1" holes; set aside the brace and bit in an old tool chest, got an electric drill, and done, really well, really nice clean holes, zip, zoom. Got the 1" spade bit on-line!

It goes on this way with hand tools, kitchen tools, yard tools, auto maintenance tools, etc. MUCH easier. E.g., kitchen tools can be awash in stainless steel; used to have to use expensive silver or rusty iron.

I do a single serving pizza I make myself: The ingredients for one pizza cost right at 40 cents with the flour at 9 cents. Fantastic agricultural productivity, along with the associated supply chain.

Tech has contributed to all of those.

I go to Google several times a day and to Amazon at least once a week. So, lots of use of tech.

Shopping, buying on-line, the shipping, tracking, paying -- lots of tech there, too.

Software? It can be a lot of fun! So, write some code, try it, get back errors, fix the errors, for that maybe put in some statements to trace the execution, and finally get it to run as desired. From then on, it won't wear out! And with that software often can just click on an icon or type in a short command and get the intended work done automatically! Boom!

A huge, biggie: Get rid of the typewriters! Beyond that, since I'm in math, get TeX for typing the math!!! Finally with TeX, the typing is no longer more work than the math, even math research! It took a LOT of transistors, processors, and computing just to get rid of the typewriters and get us to TeX.

Then get some astounding wonders,
some of the most astounding astronomy yet:
https://www.universetoday.com/145935/supermassive-black-hole...

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2020-080&fbcl...

A LOT of tech there!

Now that we know when the next big flash will come, we can have the telescopes looking and have the gravitational wave detectors expecting -- a prediction is for a big signal!

For work in an organization, it's long been with a lot of goal subordination, suck up to those above, piss on those below, and try to sabotage the people down the hall. But now with tech there are some advantages:

Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting.

Safer work, e.g., won't get finger cut off in a saw or have a load of bricks fall on your head. Won't inhale or ingest stuff that will injure or kill you.

Won't get thrown off a horse or kicked by a mule.

Maybe will get a better tech job.

Maybe will find a good startup opportunity and get rich, as rich as Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Ford, etc., heavily just from typing with fingers.

For my laptop, my incremental backups are at 11 GB -- time to do another full backup! I just got two new SATA hard disk drives, 7200 RPM, 6 Gbps data transfer rate, 4 TB per drive (no use of shingled recording)!! IIRC, $65 each! Amazing!!!

Just got in the USPS mail, ~$10, the Rostropovich performance of the Dvořák cello concerto,
B minor, with the Berlin Philharmonic and von Karajan: I lost my first copy in my recent move so wanted a replacement. Fast, easy search, ordering on-line! It's playing now: I've paid a LOT of attention to classical music and this performance is a good candidate for the most careful, passionate, and lyrical music and performance, art, "communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion", ever. Could never dream of such.

Net, a lot of good in tech!