In my opinion it’s the computer

I believe that the promises made haven’t materialized for most people

They were supposed to make work easier, do the mundane tasks. Instead workloads have increased.

Computers allow us to communicate more easily than writing letters and cards. But now we have been blessed with spam emails, identity theft, government snooping and surveillance. Scammers, crooks, miscellaneous thieves, censorship and polarization of society are all the benefits we have reaped from computers.

A simpler life was a better life.

Cell phone combo unit: portable phone; camera; computer; internet connection.

24hr News Cycle.

The computer is bad, but not as bad as the cell phone, which has effectively become a pocket sized computer.

Plastic.

Best -- Ford's Model T.

The Model T was the first car that average Americans—farmers and workers alike—could afford. Over the next two decades, Ford produced over 15 million Model Ts. To make and sell these millions of Model Ts, Ford revolutionized production by developing the moving assembly line. Few other inventions demonstrated the ingenuity of Americans in terms of both production and engineering, and even fewer were inventions that so thoroughly changed American life and captured the imagination of people. Recognizing that more than half of all Americans still lived in the country in 1907, Ford decided that the Model T would have to be rugged and easy to repair if it was going to be useful to farmers. To give the car strength but keep it light, Ford made key parts out of vanadium steel, which was three times stronger than ordinary steel. Ford realized that to make cheap cars, he would have to make a lot of them, and this led him to experiment extensively with production methods. Borrowing existing practices from other metalworking industries, Ford and his team created a line production system, in which they placed machines and workers in a carefully planned sequence of operations.

-- From The Great Courses lesson "Understanding the Inventions that Changed the World'.

Best -- Computers. Look what powerful mainframes have done to solve extremely complex scientific, mathematical, engineering and medical problems. And wait until quantum computing evolves.

Take a macro view of computers and not just today's problems. I was in grad school in the mid-80s working toward an engineering degree when I bought an IBM PC. It saved me; both in writing a thesis (word processor vs. paper & typewriter) but also solving mundane, iterative mathematical problems. What would have taken several days and a mountain of paper turned into a couple of hours.

Best -- Aviation.

Disagree with computer being bad, no computer- no Sigforum. Thanks to computers I have not been in a bank in years, post office- pre printed labels no getting in line. Able to research topics in seconds used to have to go to library. Not to mention all the things I have learned from Youtube and the hours saved finding parts on line instead of calling around town and going to get them.

Yea there are some bad things but I remember the days before them and would not want to go back.

Atomic power.

Toss-up between the internet and cell phones.

The best: nuclear power/a-bomb, h-bomb (although its full promise has yet to be realized)

The worst: the welfare state (and the kind of thinking that led to it)

The best (tie): Manned jet flight & antibiotic revolution (1920s-1930s & prior to today's potential for overprescribing).

The worst: Biological weapons. Maybe New Coke.

Yoga pants. They are the best or the worst depending on who wears them.

Worst: Thermonuclear weapons
Best: Jennifer Connelly

The worst part about this is the utter loss of privacy and anonymity

We’re now nothing more than a revenue stream to be accessed by an identity number

You can’t even trust a photograph now to be real, you can manipulate images and audio files to make anyone say anything you want - you can’t even really trust what you see or hear

Computers are a pro and a con,

when I was in the Grocery Biz, it helped tremendously,

registers and scanners,
ordering systems, granted most were based on obsolete programs and did not always talk to each ohter like they should, but if you trusted and monitored, it worked great (CAO, if you were in the biz)

and yet, with all the data generated, that meant that someone could generate reports, and then some pencil neck geek that never set foot on the sales floor or worked in a store would send you ideas, processes, and new methods of doing things that sometimes worked, sometimes did not and were always a pita to impliment,

Air conditioning/refrigeration should be in the top 10.

JP

quote:

Originally posted by arfmel:
The computer is bad, but not as bad as the cell phone, which has effectively become IS a pocket sized computer.

As the saying goes, FIFY

How quickly something that we didn’t even think about a relatively short time ago, has become an integral part of our lives.

best - hard roads
worst - the pill (a double edged sword)

Best: Air conditioning. It made the south tolerable.

Worst: The 19th Amendment. Shhh, don't tell Mrs. xd45man. I'm afraid of her.

remote control everything.

I think that in 2072
They will find out that they will confirm without a doubt ,
That ninty percent of of these signals are the cause of chromosome and d.n.a. destruction, over eight decades.