We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
technologyreview.com
We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#2Peak tech.
This feels rather behind the curve, like the author is just figuring out what we've been saying here for many years now. But the difference is that it's now okay for an MIT professor of AI Ethics to say it.
That's the crucial change. People are saying it. At the school. At the hospital. Out in public amongst friends one used to "keep up appearances" for. I can discuss it with my boss. Even my aged but highly intelligent mother pesters me about it....
"Digital technology creeps me the fuck out and I just don't want it in my life any more".
The emotional, spiritual even social disadvantages now outweigh the purported advantages. For me, that's "peak-tech", which is not necessarily about demand or economics. It's the cultural turning point we're at.
We built this stuff. So we better start thinking about how we're going to fix it.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#3This all depends on your perspective. If you want to believe tech has gone to the doldrums, that reality will manifest for you. Meanwhile people will be creating Raspberry Pi server clusters in their bedroom and hacking the planet regardless of surveillance capitalism.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#4I think the problem is that too many critics have a voice. There’s a cadre of dedicated naysayers for every new piece of technology that comes out that creates too much noise to get too excited about. Couple this with technology being used for environmental destruction, racist pursuits and job displacement and you have a generation that’s too jaded to get excited.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#5In so many wayswe don't own the technology we buy anymore, and playing with someone else's toys doesn't invite the same enthusiasm, especially long term where ecosystems are involved.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#6because we don't really need anything else?
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#7In the 80s and 90s (when I grew up) there was still a sense that technology was capable and going to be empowering people and making lives better, healthier, more convenient. Even though in many ways this wasn’t really true at the time either, the rise of social media and digital advertising as the primary examples of “big tech” I think really changed how people internal and external to the industry think about how technology intersects our lives.
When you think about science fiction and the promises of technology and then look at what we actually got (mostly platforms to sell us things) I feel like it’s natural people are discouraged.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#8because we don't really need anything else?
Disagreed. There's a lot of things we need, just that they're against corporate interests, and in some cases those corporate interests have successfully lobbied our governments to make those things illegal.
When I want a car for example, I want to have a single client application that will automatically get quotes & availability from Uber, Bolt, the local taxi service, etc and pick me the fastest/cheapest option. This is technically possible - the official clients talk to their server via an API that can be reverse-engineered and implemented by the third-party client. It's not possible because it would be a breach of ToS, breach of App Store rules (they forbid apps talking to third-party APIs without their explicit authorization) and potentially even a breach of copyright law.
When I want to order groceries, I'd like software that has a cache of all the local supermarkets' prices so that it can come up with the most cost-efficient strategy of reordering whatever I've ran out of (sometimes choosing to split it across different vendors if the cost ends up better). Yet, making a database of all products & their prices would be a breach of ToS and will get you sued (turns out pictures of products on UK grocery stores' websites are copyrighted and actually owned by a third-party).
All of this is something that computers can trivially do and there's no technical reason why we don't have it. Computers were meant to empower humans and eliminate unnecessary busywork. Instead, they've created more of it.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#9Last week I cancelled Apple Music. I found that my previously large music collection, which I had before joining Apple Music and its convenient web upload, was in tatters. Most albums were gone, and of the few ones still there, many had missing songs. Is that progress? Luckily I found the missing music as part of the backup of a laptop I decommissioned in 2016.
Much technology is becoming too difficult to judge properly. There are too many side effects and circumstances involved. Technology likes to pretend it is smart, but it is usually anything but. It is pushed upon people nevertheless.
Re: We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
#10It's the lack of control.
I used to feel excited about new screen technology and I used to upgrade my TV / monitor for watching movies pretty regularly. But now that all the newer models are "smart" which effectively means they limit my freedom, spy on me, and shove ads into my face, I'm trying to avoid upgrading as much as I can.
Similarly, I used to feel enthusiastic about all the cool new stuff Apple would put into MacBooks. But then they became more and more totalitarian and by now with Gatekeeper, Signing, mandatory App Store, and all that image scanning plans, I feel like I'm at best a tolerated visitor on MacOS, but I'm very far away from the power that root granted me when I was a kid.