• db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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    1 month ago

    Developing new medicines is world-changing innovation, cheaper and more plentiful food is. iPhones are so inconsequentials that most people don’t have one.

    The fact that many people don’t have one doesn’t mean it didn’t reshape the world! Holy shit! It’s like saying antibiotics didn’t revolutionize medicine because many people didn’t need one ever.

    Honestly this discussion is too inane to continue. I’m out.

    • dwindling7373@feddit.it
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      1 month ago

      I mean, same? I was mostly engaging for the sake of other people, you clearly have a very narrow idea of what constitutes progress and what an alternative more balanced society would bring (it’s not the extraction of toxic rare metals).

      • Darrell_Winfield@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Reading through this discussion and considering my own daily life, I find that indeed my utilization of smartphones is limited to primarily other existing advances in technology not directly associated with phones. Primarily Internet. In fact, I might be a bit abnormal because my 8 hours at work, my phone is not directly on my person and rarely used. I do, however, need to utilize it for 2FA authentication ~1-2 times per day. Which, digital personal keys were a thing before phones.

        So yeah, I’d say that smartphones aren’t a big advancement, but the combination of multiple other technological advancements.

        • gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          Continuing to exclusively look at their impact from a “well how many things do I do with them” angle is so pathetically narrow it’s no shock you feel they mean little

          Smartphones made HUGE changes to our world: Facebook wouldn’t have been what it was had it not lined up with the phone boom, tinder and similar dating apps, YouTube, in fact most social media as it exists today, vine/TikTok, the way we design web pages and software, how accessable someone is expected to be has massively changed socially, music listening and buying patterns are entirely different

          Multiple industries have been severely crippled or killed directly because smartphones became big. They’ve impacted our lives to degrees even people who study this shit don’t understand yet, you’re just so immersed in using them that you’ve forgotten

          Even when you’re not using your phone, you’re likely being impacted in some way by what phones did to our world