At my first job, the company's mission motto was 'Improving Lives with Technology'. At the time, I thought it was shitty corporate-speak, but as I've gotten older, I've come to think that that's my personal mission statement.
What got me thinking about this was a conversation with a friend about Fitbit, and how I was considering one for tracking my exercise. My thought was that having the goals would motivate me more, in addition to requiring the exercise since I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
My friend, on the other hand, mentioned that it was somewhat silly to have a device that reminded you to exercise. Why not just set a timer for 30 minutes and go until it dings?
But the timer is a device helping you, too. They're both technology helping you accomplish a task - one simply helps you timebox, the other gives you detailed data.
However, that data is of no use if you're not acting on it, which I think is where trackers like Fitbit could certainly be seen as superfluous baubles.
Another thing that got me thinking about this was Jim Dalrymple's review of the Apple Watch.
The meat of the review is about how the watch helped him accomplish an astounding change in behavior. I think this is a great thing, and a perfect example of technology improving lives. I don't think these kinds of results are limited to the Apple Watch, or even Apple specifically, though - a Fitbit, Jawbone Up, or any one of a number of other trackers could do the same thing. In this scenario, the one that introduces the least friction is best.
But even my own career work has been about improving lives with technology - I've worked as a software developer for half a decade now, and I was doing computer phone support, repair, and network administration for six years before that.
What I've found out about myself is that I like being a force multiplier for developers and other technologists. It's closer to 'dogfooding' my own problems, and I feel better trying to help technical people overcome their problems, which in turn (hopefully) helps less technical people use technology more successfully.
So, my team's project for deploying OpenStack with Ansible and the more specific task of helping our internal support team using it to help customers falls right in line with that.
Improving lives is also admittedly incredibly vague and broad. But I think that's ok. A video game can improve your life if it's bringing you enjoyment.
By the opposite token, I think technology that actively hampers people when they're trying to get something done is bad. If your technology is hard to use and makes a user's life harder, whether that user is a developer trying to understand your API without documentation, or an office worker who can't find something in a confusing GUI, it's toxic.