Ask HN:Whither Tech?

Marking up text, printing, publishing, and distributing used to be their own world. A world with its own advances and efficiencies, but in 1920 one would probably not mistake it for "tech" of its day. That would probably be radio and air travel. I find it odd that typesetting concerns have become superimposed on hard engineering and the sciences as "tech." The scale of social interaction made possible by the internet revolution has turned some things on their heads. An outside observer of our post-modern information-based economy might be taken aback that large-scale socializing seems to have supplanted what used to pass for tech just 30 years ago in the popular imagination.

Wither tech? Just because 100 million people can give the world status every morning, all of a sudden you can run machine learning algorithms on that great river of output and extract profit from the banality.

I was 8 in 78, and so my 20's were spent twiddling markup and CSS, instead of twiddling programmable ROMs. Does anyone but me regret this? I never imagined that I would spend a lot of my life doing cyber type-setting, or reading the musings of other typesetters.

update - Ten years ago there was a site like HN where someone asked a question like this: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/8/19/54354/3995