"I have long suspected that computers help a ton in a few ways, but are net harmful in a bunch of other (more common) situations" I think this is key. Those of

"I have long suspected that computers help a ton in a few ways, but are net harmful in a bunch of other (more common) situations" I think this is key. Those of us who love tech tend to ignore how rigid it is. A database schema is rigid. We've gotten better at building tools that let us change a schema, but it is still rigid. The fact that computer programmers think a "green field" project is more fun than a legacy system should be a warning to us, that even those of us who love tech still hate how rigid and tedious each system is. And moving data around a large corporation means doing ETL work, which is almost anti-productivity: given the rigidity of each schema, and given multiple databases, we need to spend more and more time translating from one schema to another. Or to put this another way, those of us who love tech tend to forget that corporations used to be run by armies of secretaries, and those secretaries allowed corporate systems to be highly flexible. A human secretary could: 1. pull meaningful data from an incomplete form 2. recognize high priority items without needing to be trained around rigid prioritization algorithms 3. easily understand a word even when it was misspelled (realize that "Albert Klien" referred to the customer "Albert Klein") 4. build commonsense hot caches (maintain easy access to the folders holding data for the most important clients) without needing complex programming. Or for lawyers, bookmark the most commonly cited precedents for the work the lawyer did. (Whereas several startups, in 2023, are still working to bring NLP techniques to precedent search.) 5. help customers navigate both internal and 3rd party bureaucracies When we gave up on secretaries, we lost a lot of flexibility that we have only slowly and expensively been winning back with technology. Perhaps the cost of giving up on secretaries was underestimated? And then of course, there are the ways that computers clearly damage productivity: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter; all distractions that burn up hours that people are at the office.