I used to think this way too. And actually I would get a little depressed, as a software engineer, because I worried that I wasn't doing much useful work only c

I used to think this way too. And actually I would get a little depressed, as a software engineer, because I worried that I wasn't doing much useful work only creating software all day. But then one day I had a profound insight: For nearly all of human history, the ONLY agent of change has been software. That is, our bodies have remained exactly the same for the last 80,000 years and the only thing that's changed is our culture, knowledge, languages, etc. We've used those changes in software and information to create new physical tools but the only thing that's taken us from the beginning to today is slow, steady improvements in software and "information processing". I actually think that it is a high leverage phenomenon that most of our innovation is now focused much more significantly on pure information. It's hard to understand how this can't be causing acceleration in change.