This is a great article and is useful for putting tech into perspective in a modern context. The quote about the emperor not needing the steam engine because h

This is a great article and is useful for putting tech into perspective in a modern context. The quote about the emperor not needing the steam engine because he already has slaves to do that work for free is an excellent one. It neatly demonstrates the role of technology as a tool for liberation. From the perspective of the emperors of past centuries, our modern world is, in many ways, worse than theirs. So of course the emperor would never approve of such technologies; even if you showed them a crystal ball and removed all the risk, they still wouldn't want it. There are parallels in the modern age. You don't need an emperor to get the same effect. With our centrally controlled monetary system, there are strong Cantillion effects which cause wealth compounding; this creates an increasingly strong incentive for people to service the rich and an increasingly weak incentive to service the poor. So we are somewhat in a situation where those who have money in tech think "Why do we need more efficient software tools? I have 10K software engineers on hand to build whatever the company needs. I have a market monopoly so their wages are peanuts to me... The money comes in regardless of development efficiency or improved security. We don't need more efficient tools... Why? So that my small competitors can build software at the same speed as me with only 1% of the engineering capacity? Why would I want such tool to exist?" But with high inequality, liberation of the poor isn't financially viable. So long as the poor are willing to engage in the current system, their living standards will keep declining, because nobody who is in a position to liberate them has an incentive to do so. There is no incentive to produce such technologies. There is little doubt that technologies have been used to further enslave people, rather than liberate them. This is why the woke/DEI agenda is so horrible, it's pure gaslighting. Preaching equality while implementing the least equal, least fair system ever designed in the history of mankind.