Speaking on a handful of these that I'm familiar enough with to opine on:
- Photography hasn't erased other visual arts. Both require a separate skillset; both have their uses and their enthusiasts. Photography benefits from having a lower skill floor, in my experience doing it, and this in turn has led to commercial photography eclipsing commercial painting (barring things like painting buildings) as a viable business model, largely.
I'm not sure if we're better or worse off as a society for having gone through that shift.
- Television is arguably
not a net positive in society (I won't say net negative
yet, but there are some reasonable arguments for that position). It enables a form of passive consumption that allows bad arguments to come through as persuasive through the gradual (on the scale of months and years) numbing of critical appraisal of the media being consumed.
This has more- and less-pronounced areas. In the US (which is geographically close to me and which has an outsize proportion on my own country's culture), Fox News is an excellent example of how TV can erode critical thinking.
- Smartphones
arguably reproduce and amplify this problem, and tack on others: they make it increasingly easy to dissociate from daily life, and make it easier to continue consuming content from actors increasingly interested in steering conversations in one direction or another (on the most benign end, it's influencers trying to get you to buy things, which obviously has negative economic impacts on an individual scale; on the more overtly harmful end, they serve as a hardware channel for less-regulated or unregulated extreme and hateful content).
Just like with TV, smartphones have clear benefits and utility in daily life. They aren't abjectly bad inventions, but they have a serious societal toll, and it's difficult to ignore that.
- In aviation, the first generation of (relatively modern) automation
did lead to a high number of accidents and loss of life. American Airlines flight 965, in 1995, is a well-studied case of an over-reliance on flight automation before it was widely understood among pilots what the limits of these early-modern incarnations of autoflight were.
In the wake of that accident, many aviation regulators instituted or began requiring that manufacturers and airlines formalize training and operational procedures that protect thoroughly against this sort of cognitive gap.
I think that last example (and many aviation accidents) are an interesting example to study in the context of software. Aviation's
extremely and
conspicuously responsive to accidents, often requiring procedural and hardware changes as a result of these. They can be as simple as a software patch, or as complex as the redesign of a component because a human factors analysis found that it could be confusing under stress.
In software, we like to think that we're a serious industry, sometimes. We spent much of the 2010s going in what I found to be a good direction: the development of IaC, the popularization and standardization of tools like Git, registries for vulnerabilities like the NVD, and even the development of languages like Rust which address historical technical shortfalls of high-performance, low-level languages like C; but we always fell short, industry-wide, on matching these toolchain upgrades with technically-rigorous procedures.
For every borrow checker, there's vibe coding.