I used to be excited about new tech, but I rarely am anymore

It might be due to a combination of a few things:

1. The compounding acceleration of tech has numbed us to the marvels that are happening around us.

2. Big Tech, and Capitalism in general, has been getting more and more extractive than innovative for a long time, which has made us cynical. (Or maybe it's always been like this, we just notice it more as we age.)

3. New form factors excite us more than new capabilites because they're much more tangible. Things like CRISPR and GLP-1 are basically miracles but don't impact our day-to-day, whereas the iPhone revolutionized how we interact with the world on a daily basis.

4. Movies and TV have portrayed science fiction and futuristic technology so convincingly for so long, that when those things actually come true we don't really notice.

I think these explain what's happening with the current AI revolution. The technology, if you think about it, is objectively insane. It fills me with excitement and dread.

However we've seen countless variations of AI in popular media for decades so it doesn't seem "new." Worse, GenAI was introduced to us as a chatbot, a form-factor even more underwhelming than the mostly useless Siri and Alexa, let alone humanoid robots or holograms. And to top it off, it's threatening to take our jobs, something that popular SciFi didn't really talk about, so already we are primed to look at it more negatively.

But I cannot overstate how impossible it was just 4 short years ago for computers to do any of what they are doing today, and how much it will change the world. And yet look at the discourse around it.

It's like some weird, alien life has suddenly sprung up amongst us and we're all just going, "But it writes crappy code though."

Yes it is you getting grumpy, not older.

My 95-year-old great granddad finds delight regularly, from his great sounding carbon fiber trombone (you try holding a full brass one as an nonogenarian!) to how much self-driving or AI has improved in 2025 to now.

I know 2 middle-aged to older ladies who both had bad accidents after their husbands bought or rented an e-bike for them that they did not have the skillset to handle. Months of recovery, thankfully nothing life-threatening.

> To those people I wish a slow and painful death. I'm on generally the same page, but this is a bit much.

I dont think it's that flawless. DVDs introduced some anti-consumer features to limit what you are allowed to do with your media that are now widespread, like copy-protection/drm/hdcp limiting your choice of playback devices and preventing you from creating backups, or enforced market segmentation through region-codes. Every VHS was rewritable, only special DVD were.

Don't feel that's it at all. Let's be more specific instead of just "tech" since that can be so many things.

I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.

And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.

What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.

Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.

So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.