> The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.
This reminds me of "Youth without God" by Ödön von Horváth:
> Perhaps Anne’s mother was right. Perhaps men are mad now—those who aren’t mad haven’t the courage to put their maniacal fellows into strait-jackets.
Your right, as are your examples, but I want to point out an interesting thing about your examples :)
> - CT and MRI data processing
> - scheduling systems for universities and other schools (makes education more scalable)
Those two read as if they are of different urgency (#1: whoever needs it urgently is at risk of dying, schedules for "non-urgent" cases will be affected for months, turning many into urgent cases; #2: the education systems will suffer, but it only gets dire after multiple days), until you realize that #2 also applies to e.g. hospitals.
Medicine at scale is already barely scraping by as it is (see: overworked staff etc. etc.), but disrupt the internal IT working of hospitals and the indirect body count will rise fast.
> I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that classes not being final or sealed (C#) by default is another failure to set sensible defaults, akin to "everything is mutable unless explicitly marked const".
Properly designing classes for inheritance takes proactive care and is, in my experience, almost never done unless the author has been forced to by external forces (through APIs or agreements with other developers).
For various people, some of that flipped back, and they now record voice messages to send them through e.g. WhatsApp.
My percieved explanation for this is that most of them can't be bothered to type a message but are still very happy to waste the recipient's time. Yes, I'm not thrilled about it.
OTOH, at least these messages are still more asynchronous and less interrupting than a phone call. But the inability to skim them still bothers me to no end.
You write "wherever possible", but: Have you ever seen the beancounting itself having been under scrutiny?
I'd wager a big part of it is also the same politics based asymmetry that's visible everywhere; like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM or people only get credit for managing a crisis, not preventing it in the first place.
If I can add to that: A precursor to both of those would be the precision lathe, from which eventually two of the most crucial prerequisites for the industrialization stem: The ability to a) produce machine parts with a high degree of precision catered for their purpose and/or context, and b) the ability to develop widely established norms these parts can adhere to (or, if you will, by which they could be judged).
The steam engine wouldn't have had its impact without the possibility for e.g. precision engineered pistons, and any industrialization would have been severely impaired without the possibilities that the distributed production of exchangeable parts (even as simple as screws, nuts and bolts) to established norms came with.
I can also do nothing at scale just with a hammock :)