alt Hacker NewsWhile I agree with your sentiment, I doubt that we can really judge that properly without some objective distance in time. The invention of the printing press, canals, gunpowder, sailing, may have changed lives quite a bit. Consider also the people who were "discovered" by the Europeans [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_ep...
Replies
All of those things changed some individual lives I the short term, and changed societies in the long term. But they did not change societies in the short term. The average life in the decades before the printing press was pretty much the same as in the decades after. Inventions that massively altered entire societies within a human lifespan of their invention are pretty new. Maybe somebody more familiar with the history of technology can correct me, but I can’t think of anything like that before the steam engine.
You just listed "inventions" that emerged across a 6,000 year timeframe.