Taken individually, all the improvements might seem merely like changes in degree -- Amazon is an improved Sears, Roebuck; Wikipedia is an online version of Bri

Taken individually, all the improvements might seem merely like changes in degree -- Amazon is an improved Sears, Roebuck; Wikipedia is an online version of Britannica, etc. -- but in the aggregate it creates a difference in kind. By making things easier and faster, it becomes possible to do more. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has done more -- and I don't necessarily just mean work at my job, I mean hobbies and projects and artwork and things that I want to do, completely disconnected from needing to do them -- because it's a lot easier to find information, order things, talk to other people, etc. Projects that would have just been too complex to get off the ground a few decades ago, because they would have involved multiple library trips and probably bunches of ILLs and perhaps correspondence with various people, each letter having a significant roundtrip time, are the work of a few nights of reading online, a couple of online orders, and a weekend. It's not AI, but it's certainly an enhancement. I'm not sure that there are any entirely new categories of things that people, as a group, can do that we weren't able to do before computerization, but it's certainly possible for an individual to do more, and a number of artificial limitations have basically disappeared.