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What's more, there would be a lot fewer people around if computers weren't helping us grow food, generate energy, cure diseases and move everything around just in time. The more I think about it, the more I think computers are a sort of virus and we're in a symbiotic relationship with them.

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The revolution, discovery of fossil fuels and antibiotics, international trade, etc, were all widespread before the invention of computers. You could argue that operations research (a branch of applied math that deals with logistics mostly) has evolved concurrently with computer technology, but the former has one or two decades of a head start in terms of adoption by private enterprises.

I think it's more like computers allows us to do the same stuff faster and at a broader scale, but it has had little impact so far in which stuff do we choose to do.

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