Probably should have been more explicit about the first statement - I agree that the profession can be transformative by the opportunities it creates for those involved. My first statement is meant to say that I think it is unlikely that an individual piece of software is going to be tansformative to the overall human condition in its application. Many will argue that Google, Facebook, etc. are counter examples - I agree with that to some extent in that there is probably some truth and some non-truth to that viewpoint depending on the perspective.
A lot of it is about multiplier effects, which can be subtle. Google and Github make people better at their jobs (especially software engineers, who don't have to read horribly-written manuals for shitty commercial software, because they can now use excellent open-source tools and search for what they need). This speeds economic growth and innovation by making people more productive.
Multiplier-dom (for lack of a better word) used to be for managers and executives only (although at least a third to one-half are dividers in most companies). Executives and capitalism could claim that they were the real producers and movers of progress and that the workers, "mere" adders. were hangers-on (Randism) but that's no longer the case. Now software engineers can be multipliers without access to capital or bureaucratic installation into a managerial role.
Global economic growth is currently about 4% per year. That's the highest it's ever been, but there's no reason it can't be much higher-- possibly 20 or 30 percent per year. That seems radical, but in 1798 (Malthus) economic growth under 1%, and that (sub-1% global economic growth) had been the norm for eternity. Malthus was wrong mathematically in his assumption that economic growth was linear (even in pre-industrial times, the curve was exponential-- just a very slow exponential curve) but he was right about population increases outpacing economic growth and leading to disaster or war. That happened constantly in pre-industrial societies. It stopped happening in the developed world around 1850. Some time in the next two hundred years we'll probably see post-scarcity.
I, for one, would love to see a post-scarcity world. I don't care if I live to be 1000 years old, in the sense that if we don't eradicate scarcity I don't want to live past my natural ~75-100 (even for the rich, the with-scarcity existence is too crappy to justify more than a century in such a world in one incarnation) but a post-scarcity would be worth seeing. Technology is a chance to contribute, in some small way, to the overarching effort to see that through.
