> I cannot think of a single product/thing/whatever that accomplished the goal you mentioned. Really? Let's look at his goal again (my emphasis): > make a dou

> I cannot think of a single product/thing/whatever that accomplished the goal you mentioned. Really? Let's look at his goal again (my emphasis): > make a double-digit percentage of humans on Earth happier, cleaner, safer, healthier, or more efficient. Hey, a union! That makes his claim a lot weaker and far easier to justify. Now we'll be generous and ask for 10%, the lowest double-digit percent, of the population. What's a candidate technology that immediately comes to my mind in the past? The microcomputer. Let's suppose the microcomputer revolution didn't begin until 1975. The world population in 1975 was about 4 billion, ten percent of that is 400 million, which is a little more than the current US population. Do you think that over the last 40 years, the microcomputer has not achieved an improvement in any of happiness, cleanliness, safety, health, or efficiency for just 400 million people? What planet are you living on? I'd say the microcomputer even satisfies the intersection of those improvements as well, but that was not the parent's claim for a goal. Maybe it's hard to achieve the goal over a short timespan you say. Let's pick a more modern example, then. If you believe Facebook, they have over 800m active users worldwide, which satisfies the 10% barrier quite nicely for our bloated 7 billion world population, and they've been around for less than a decade. Are you going to say that Facebook doesn't improve any of happiness, cleanliness, safety, health, or efficiency for those active users? Come on. I don't particularly like Facebook myself but I wouldn't make such a negative claim. Ed: looks like I was beat to the punch on the obvious example of Facebook.