alt Hacker NewsYour company's software enhances the process somehow, making it easier or faster or cheaper. Your company's software did not unlock the technology of road building.
There were roads built before your company's software and I'm sure if your company disappeared that ultimately roads would get built with or without their software.
It would be interesting to look at all the technological advances of the last 60 years and break them down into categories based on what happens if they went away though (category A: the field just goes back to 1950s and we more or less get by vs Category B: society utterly collapses).
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It's fun to do it forwards too (ie all recent technological advances that could be category a where society cannot live without it or category b where society is like meh or even category c where soecity utterly collapses because of it).
The internet as a whole can arguably be all three at the same time.
It's less about whether we could live without it, more about whether we could live without it now.
We objectively don't need credit cards. We could do with cash just fine. If we were told that Visa / Mastercard were shutting down in 5 years, we'd manage to muddle through. If they suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth? People would definitely die due to starvation.