Some high-quality computer peripherals: mouse, keyboard, or chair.
Many people spend a huge fraction of their day on the computer, so it’s important to optimize that experience as much as possible. For a long time, I thought of that optimization purely in terms of hardware performance, or operating system, with maybe some time spent on files structure or monitor. But more recently I got a high-quality keyboard and mouse, and they’ve made a huge difference for much less than the cost of a hardware upgrade.
It’s easy to forget about the material objects that you’ll be in physical contact with, so they’re low-hanging fruit for a lot of people.
It is often the case that technology increases with surprising inevitability, or at least regularity- Moore’s law is the famous example. Another amusing story has American researchers predicting the timing of the first orbital satellite based on nothing more than extrapolated trends in maximum rocket velocity. They dismissed the prediction, because they didn’t think their research project was on track. But sure enough, the first satellite was launched just on time- by the Russians.
Multiple discovery is another interesting phenomenon, in which a previously un-thought idea is simultaneously discovered by multiple people, often without any direct contact between them. It seems that there are a number of technological advancements that are simply ‘adjacent’, and are extremely likely to be discovered given some current civilization state.
There’s an implication here that the categories of ‘social forces’ and ‘technological advancement’ are not always carving reality at the joints. Moore’s law depend[s|ed] to at least some degree on the economic forces incentivizing chip innovation. Social policies can and will influence those incentives- and contrariwise, a single individual choosing to enter such a saturated field of research is unlikely to cause any kind of inflection point. Similarly, the ‘adjacent ideas’ are likely to be discovered with or without any given person’s input, but may be neglected if social forces empty out a discipline entirely or change its governing ethos.
None of this implies that a conscientious, intelligent person or group couldn’t individually make a world-changing technological discovery. But at a minimum, we can say tech is embedded in a network of economic and social forces, and that it has inputs from that network as well as outputs to it. I agree that it’s an extremely good choice if you’re looking for a career that will create a more awesome world, and if you have the aptitude for it. But public opinion and crime rates are not simple epiphenomena of the underlying technological infrastructure. Someone with great skill in social influence can set up virtuous or catastrophic cycles within the broader pattern of civilization- although perhaps with fewer degrees of freedom, since social problems are really hard.