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Many people spend 10% of their waking lives in cars, and more of it earning money to afford their cars. Automatic driving with the associated ease of fractional
by ericd 14y ago
Many people spend 10% of their waking lives in cars, and more of it earning money to afford their cars. Automatic driving with the associated ease of fractional car ownership is potentially huge. Keep in mind that not everyone works at a desk job that can almost as easily be done remotely.
Social networks really, really aren't nearly as impactful in the the productive sense. They've mostly made it easier to chat with more people, and browse through more photos - things that are intensely interesting to people, but not really useful.
- akg 14y agoI am not sure how things like this will change our lives to be honest, I think it is too early to say which will have a bigger impact. To your latter point, I can understand that most people use social networks to merely chat and browse drunken photos of friends, but that is like saying that all the invention of the telephone did was make it easier to share mindless banter with your friends. There are fringe benefits that arise from these kinds of technologies that could be really impactful. Twitter's use during the Arab Spring comes to mind as the most recent example of this. I admit that Facebook doesn't provide any great "technological"/scientific achievement, but it does have a strong network effect supporting it; and that is something that can be impactful in a very productive sense.