Edit: I see everyone's latching onto agriculture as a literal suggestion rather than a rhetorical device, sorry for the confusion. I think it's valid to treat agriculture as seriously as cyberspace but honestly I don't know enough about the former to respond to the good scrutiny in this thread.
Climate science is clearly being overwhelmed by bad actors, generally exerting their influence thru bot & troll farms, communicating thru various software&internet platforms
And climate science is once again really not impacting our lives - it should be, we should all be making sweeping changes to our behaviors and requiring massive corporate overhauls & pricing in costs of disposal & cleanup - but it's not, because no one cares, and no organization with real teeth bites you for that.
Software, though, it doesn't matter what you do, it will find a way to impact you & what you've done, and if you have non cognizance of that someone else will probably eat your lunch eventually. It's obvious how climate science doesn't have the same level of import wrt every aspect of our lives [note I'm not saying this makes sense, and I would argue climate science is the most important thing, but someone saying "pollute less" isn't more credible for it].
Put another way, it isn't like the head of cabbage I ate six months ago has me writing better code then or today. But the script I wrote to make my development loop faster still does.
The system is chaotic and interdependent, but the flows of causation are still broadly understandable. It even makes sense on a philosophical level. Humans were once the only agents in the economy with decision making power. Now a human writes some code and the code operates long after the human that wrote it has gone. Output is no longer tied to attention.
Furthermore, we happen to live in an existence where information transfer is extremely, extremely, cheap from a resource standpoint. So the software doesn't just scale attention on the one computer it was written on, it scales for everyone! An upgrade to Microsoft Excel helps millions of people all at once! We can even use software to make better computers and software! It's naturally self-building, and the main reason why I think it will continue to lead biotech until biotech merges with software.
In my opinion that Network begins with the Treaty of Bern in 1874, but you could make an argument for the Congress of Vienna near the start of that century if you squint hard enough. The big deal is connecting people, in the case of Bern by enabling everyone to send and receive letters. The latest iteration (an electronic digital network, the Internet) is just a further iterative improvement on that idea.
But Programming is even more fundamental because it's recursively meta-applicable. Improvements in agriculture don't apply to themselves, but improvements in programming do and that's enabled exponential growth in capabilities.
The seed is present in abstract ideas by Turing and others near the start of the 20th century, but the practical application definitely begins with "Amazing" Grace Hopper and her "compiler" (we would not today classify what Grace designed as a "compiler" but that's what she called it). Grace saw that the job of processing programming symbols to turn them into machine code is exactly the sort of symbol manipulation that you can practically program computers to do, and so designed such a program, starting a process that continues to this day and we now all rely upon without thinking about it. When you improve the compiler program, you get a more capable way to write programs, including the compiler program, and so on forever. That's how you get from slaving over a stack of punched cards to Lisp REPL in about a generation.
