I would modify this: Software increases our effectiveness at what it's applied to.

Sometimes, that's what we were doing before. Sometimes it isn't.

Sometimes it changes what we're doing enough that the old way becomes untenable, even if the new way is worse. Like if you take a crappy, mostly okay, sometimes terrible system and make it enough cheaper than the old system that always worked, most of the market may switch to the new shitty cheap thing.

Yes.

I occasionally miss the quality of landline phone calls, for one example.

I wouldn't say software is entirely neutral. As you say, they have their faults, and some are designed in a way that lends itself to evil purposes.

Openness is the key, as the Steve Jobs quote in a parent comment is saying. Users need to know what's going on, and our clickwrap culture hasn't been cutting it these past two decades.