> "Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big thing

> "Change gives the illusion of progress". I asked him what he meant and he responded with something to the effect of "They have the habit of changing big things every 5-10 years on purpose to make it look like they are productive, and to justify their own roles, one guy will come in and 'cut costs', the new guy after him will 'invest'". That's a very succinct way to put it. I think that observation also applies to consumer technology (e.g. regularly re-doing UIs to "improve" them when the changes are either in fact regressions or just different but not better). We've had it drilled in our heads throughout the modern era that new == better (e.g. the ubiquitous "new and improved!" marketing language), but that's not actually always true. Change for change's sake justifies itself through that misunderstanding. In the recent past, we had a really high rate of genuine technological progress. But at some point we'll have picked most of low hanging fruit and will enter a period of slower progress, where faking progress will become more an more tempting for producers than the real thing.