General Discussion

Practically, the biggest life-changers to me are the cell phone (and infrastructure) and GPS. I missed my Mom at the airport decades ago and it took all evening to find her (she took a cab to my home) in the days of landline phones.

Books are available on the internet. Vast amounts of information (I totally avoid garbage)

Others? I built computers from kits (I mean soldering hundreds of sockets and chips into S-100 computer cards) when there were no personal computers, and had a blast and created a good career.

Philosophically: Open Source software is wildly liberative, but takes evangelists to make it truly so (and there's only one ME)

Downside? Since the day "dot com" was unleashed, the internet (and much of life) became a cesspool and killing field.

That said, I made a living partly in aerospace, in the company "We're the dot in dot-com" (Sun) and in University computer support and lots of other areas.

The difference between helping/liberating people and exploiting people IS A CHOICE.

Many/most techies "Choose Poorly"

I grew up with
Thoreau "Men have become the machines of their machines".
Lewis Mumford "The Myth of the Machine"
Ted Nelson "Computer Lib; Dream Machines"
and others

I built kits!! Technology was fun. Sometimes, it still is.

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What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelley:
https://kk.org/thetechnium/what-technology/

So, looking at the evolution of life and the long-term histories of past technologies, what are the long-term trajectories of the technium? What does technology want?

Possibilities
To increase diversity 

To maximize freedom/choices

To expand the space of the possible

Efficiencies 

To increase specialization/uniqueness 

To increase power density 

To increase density of meaning

To engage all matter and energy

To reach ubiquity and free-ness 

To become beautiful

Complexity
To increase complexity 

To increase social co-dependency

To increase self-referential nature

To align with nature

Evolvability

To accelerate evolvability

To play the infinite game