Tech is not always an improvement, but not due to the reason described in the comment above.
His negative presentation obscures an obvious fact: lower prices create the miracle of accessibility - people who could have never afforded the previous generation can now afford the new one, and in some cases their lives are changed for the better.
I know most of us here are snobs, but let's not forget that only the King of France would have had access to colorful non-itchy clothes back in the day, and now everyone can have them.
It may not spotlight the fact that lower prices facilitate accessibility, but I'm not oblivious to it. I definitely don't want to exchange cheap cotton knit t-shirts with hand-woven garments that cost me a month's labor or something. However, only considering the consumer-side satisfaction is characteristic of our culture's obsession with consumerism and economy at the cost of everything else. We all have to work, even with ever increasing tech we work probably more than anytime in history. I don't believe we're going to hit some inflection point where suddenly humans will be freed from labor. There is satisfaction to be found in craft and honing skill. If we delegate all that to machines that spit out crummy imitations, and humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech, clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day, I think that is a net loss for life satisfaction. Who cares if you can own a shitty McMansion when what you experience during majority of your wakeful life is mind-numbing frustration?
At a higher price you can still find craftsmanship. But now, as always, you have to afford it.
And regarding consumerism, it's not only consumerism. Washing machines and fridges and freezers and microwaves changed the way we lived. Especially washing machines and fridges made our lives much easier and better.
I'm also not a Luddite, so if it seems I'm making a vast anti-tech argument, I'm truly not. It's easy to get drawn into a futurism vs tradition argument, but I don't want to take either side in that debate. I love tools and I love inventions that amplify a human being's power and effectiveness. But there are tools that are miserable to use, produce horrible results, but are just enough to be acceptable and offer The Business enormous cost savings (or sometimes just the illusion of it). I don't have the energy to try and write a manifesto right now for which tools fall into either camp, but maybe some day.
I like writing code, and I think a lot of other people do too. But it's not just that I like writing the code and want it to be as low-level and arcane as possible. Give me a language that lets me be more expressive and accomplish more and I'll be all the more happy to adopt this tool and incorporate it into my craft.
But, imagine The Business decides that coders writing code is just too expensive, so we've purchased an AI that dials into all the conference calls stakeholders have regarding a project, and subsequently it can generate all the code necessary to meet the requirements. Well, kind of. After sitting in on the meetings, it can instantly generate the code that would have taken a dev team a whole quarter, and then send it over to QA. The only catch is that code is spaghetti and the defect rate is really high. Still, The Business only needs 25% of the coders that it used to have. But their job is a little different now. They don't write code per se. They just QA and fix bugs. The code is horrible, there's no design or architecture to speak of, it's hard to debug, and fixing defects is mind-numbing. But, at the end of the day, the low quality product is still good enough to sell, everyone else in the industry is doing it too, and besides, the cost savings is too huge to ignore.
No one has to "write" code anymore. Did our lives get easier and better? What is the ultimate end of easiest and best? No one has to do a thing and minimally acceptable food shows up when we're hungry while we continually slurp down personalized, proceduraly generated sitcoms?
But that also ignores quality of life (as a result of work) and general work conditions. Working in a mine for an hour (or a hunter stalking prey, or working in a field) is not the same as an hour sitting in an office.
> where suddenly humans will be freed from labor
If by labor you mean physically intensive work, we are already there, most people live sedentary working lifestyles. If you mean any type of work - perhaps not, but at the same time "The Devil finds work for idle hands" so I'm not sure it's desirable, humans need something to do, and bored teenagers often cause mayhem.
> humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech
Not sure how overseeing a brick-laying robot is more/less mind-numbing than laying the bricks yourself.
> clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day
exactly the case with self-checkout, and the job doesn't seem more/less boring to me than working a checkout. At least the self-checkout machines improve over time.
Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.
Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.
I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.
