Most “technology” these days are hardly more than gimmicky baubles that don’t actually bring much value to, well, anything really.
Look at all the Alexa devices. Amazon literally cannot figure out how to make a profit on it and they’re quickly trying to make it a footnote.
All that hardware dedicated to Alexa will be soon a pile of garbage.
But here’s the rub…
Simple technology is still technology. A hammer is technology of an early human era. We’ve only been in the era of modern medicine, for example, for hardly 100 years. When you talk about “technology” you’re talking about way the fuck more than just computers and technobaubles.
When it comes to medical tech alone if you consider how many diseases we’ve wiped out, and the new advances we continue to make in medical science (RNA vaccines, recently an entirely new class of antibiotics), the idea that these don’t contribute to our quality of life is a joke.
Medical advances and advances in food technology and food cleanliness have 100% improved the lives of people all over the world. We went from terrible infant mortality rates 200 years ago where half your fucking kids will die before adulthood to people basically choosing how many kids they want because by and large, most of them will make it to adulthood and onward. It genuinely wasn’t that long ago that our average life expectancy was a lot shorter.
Now, the bigger question is a societal one: How to we ensure the new technology that really brings value to human life is distributed equitably? Because currently, it really fucking isn’t.
As for you and your job: Technology and programming itself isn’t useless at all. It’s what it’s being used for that is at issue. There are plenty of things a programmer can do that benefit the world, they just won’t be the kind of job that pays well. Amazon, for example, isn’t going to pay you money to change the world in positive ways, they’ll pay you to make Amazon money. All companies are like this. We all have to have a day job, so my suggestion would be to find out how you can use your skills to help the world equitably (maybe contribution to Free Open Source Software, for example) in your spare time, and then save money with a goal to use your skills more equitably as a life-goal.
FoldIt and Folding@Home were both great examples of programming, games, and genuine forward-movement scientific research. Maybe you could contribute to new groups like this, with the aim of benefiting everyone with their research.
Some folks help the world through what some consider illegal means with their programming. Anna’s Archive, Library Genesis, and Sci-Hub all exist with the purpose of giving people access to information. They use programming and networking skills to get around network blocks and so on.
Programming skills can be used for all kinds of good. You just have to choose to follow those paths.