I think technology's great, but the way people have chosen to use it is occasionally awful.

It could be a sign that you’re too surrounded by the stuff. I used to always be tech & specs obsessed. It was like I viewed the world through the lens of technology because that was going to make new things possible.

But then in recent years, my relationship with tech has changed and I am better for it. It’s less core to my personal existence even though it is just as handy as ever and my life is full of screens.

It starts to sound like cliches and platitudes, but most of what makes the world beautiful and life worthwhile has not changed. Seriously just spending a lot of time outside and with the people that matter to me produce undeniable results, even if I have to drug myself to kickstart the process. But after doing that a few times, being mindful and intentional about the whole process being for positive outcomes, I start not just looking forward to those occasions but prioritizing time & money to help.

This is exactly how the 90s felt when the dotcom bubble was building and moores law was in high effect.

Every 6 months your computer components were obsolete

256MB hardrives! Holy shit sooo much space!

Whaaaaaat 1GB drives?!? Daaaaamn

Whoa whoa whoa CdRom? Blink I can write to cds? Whats this + - business?! Sneeze, holy shit you can rewrite a cdnow?!

When I was young, I really valued the idea of technological progress. It was almost axiomatically the goal of humanity. Getting greater abilities to do more things more easily... it seemed like the ultimate goal.

But now that I'm older, I've seen what happens with technological power like that, and it isn't great. Yes, we can do more things more easily than before. And what is the result? The main result seems to be increase consolation of wealth and power, and increasing the rate at which the world's resources are depleted.

• People can now connect instantly and effortlessly with anyone anywhere in the world - and the result is that enormous numbers of people shun their local peers and instead have shallow parasocial relationships with strangers who's job it is to advertise products to them.
• Clothes are cheap and easy to create - and the result is mountains of waste created by fast-fashion low-quality throw-away clothes largely made from slave labour. Similarly for many products, in particular plastic products are now choking the world in waste.
• Cars are more efficient, and production quality is high - and the result is massively oversized monsters, completely negating the efficiency benefit and instead increasing the amount of space and maintenance required to handle the increased size and weight of the machines. The streets are basically filled with cars and spaces for cars, with less and less space for people to do people things.
• Half-decent AI has finally been created. It's a long-held dream come true... except that the outcome isn't quite what we hoped. There's a lot to say on this topic, but just to keep it snappy, I'll oversimplify it by saying that people are not using it to do better. They are instead outsourcing their own thoughts and imagination.

Our silky-smooth hyper-connected ultra-convenient world is not leading people to be happier, or smarter, or kinder. And it certainly isn't helping humanity survive longer. We're burning out fast.

A lot of what we have superficially looks like 'progress', but in full description it looks more like a dystopia. Things are easier, but perhaps the good things were already easy enough; and so the main effect is that exploitation and manipulation got easier. Even when we agree that we're going in the wrong direction, the messages are still muddied enough that we accelerate rather than change course.

Anyway... I don't agree with my younger self. I no longer think that technological advances are intrinsically good. I think taking things a bit more slowly might have been more wise. I've thought about it a lot, and I think a core part of it is that money corrupts. Unfortunately, money is very tightly intertwined with most of what we do - so that's a pretty difficult problem to fix. So I won't go into more detail about that now!

Isnt this the premise of the matrix? Tech plateaued in 1999 and went downhill from there

Yes. Much of the technological improvement I’ve seen in the last 20 years isn’t real meaningful. Smartphones don’t make my life better. A 60” flat screen 4k TV doesn’t make movies any better. My 2019 Jeep gets worse gas mileage than my 1978 Gremlin. Plane rides are worse. Ads cover everything I look at. We no longer own music we like to listen to

Was any of it good? Sure, but most of it is just garbage to generate more consumption

Yeah. Great engineering is, if you can do more with less. What was the last time you have seen that in software?

At some point, there was this shift where the technology was no longer being designed to benefit the user, but to benefit the creator. The problem is that the creators are now trillion-dollar multi-national organizations who also lobby against my wellbeing and safety in areas of rulemaking and regulation. So now I am fine foregoing the "technology" whenever I can.

It would probably seem less daunting if we knew that these great technological innovations couldn't be controlled and hoarded by a small group, but were instead widely available for the public to use on equal ground. And further, if we would all equally share in the efficiency benefits, rather than just a small group.

Like, if my boss told me half my job was being automated by ai, but I'd still get the same salary and only have to work 2.5 days per week, I certainly wouldn't complain.

Those kinds of thoughts started creeping in during my mid 20s as well. Before that age everything is new and better because you don’t yet have the experience to know if something is just new but not better.

It is mostly hype honestly

It feels to me like you don't hate progress, but you hate late stage capitalism.

If progress happened without it being forced on you, without you "having" to adapt to not "fall behind", when all your needs were provided for without having to compete to satisfy them...

Would you really mind progress that much?

ITT: people hating on capitalism and its grip on technology.

What your experiencing is a kind of social decay due to people being squeeze more and more, and not just economically.

This isn’t specific to tech though, if there was no tech, they would just find other ways to make life harder.

This is just the journey we’ve been on since the Industrial Revolution where the market decides what our new environment is for the sake of profit.

The good news is that it’s a journey of ups and downs, so it could stop being dystopian soon.

Technology moving forward doesn’t mean you have to move with it. In fact, there’s an advantage in realizing when something is good enough and that you don’t need a better version. Smartphones, for example, haven’t added a single feature I need since around 2016. In many ways, they’ve even regressed, using more fragile materials for aesthetics and removing useful features like the headphone jack. Back then, I needed to invest in flagship models to get something I liked, but now the flagship models are overkill for what I need, so I can just go with a mid-range device instead.

The same applies to cars. My truck is from 2007 and has every feature I need, without the ones I don’t. I have no intention of upgrading anytime soon. I can just keep replacing broken parts for a fraction of the cost it would take to do the same on a newer model.

I think a problem here is that technological advancement and technological progress are not necessarily the same thing. I don't think that every new piece of technology that pushes us further into some kind of strange new world necessarily is good for humanity, or society, or even just the individual. I think this is some of what you're noting in your post here. Sure, on the whole the internet has probably been a net positive for Humanity, but one can't deny that at the same time there are a lot of strikingly negative aspects of the internet, and that it's further and seemingly endless encroachment on our lives is deleterious.

I think that as I've gotten older I've become a bit more technology averse, or at the least a bit more suspicious of technology, than I used to be as a child, and maybe part of that is becoming a father, but at the very least I can respect where you're coming from and I agree with you. It seems like our world is just a never-ending carousel of novelty and we're never allowed to just absorb and respect the things that we have before something new comes in and shifts the paradigm.

The problem isn't necessarily the tools we develop. The question is who do these tools empower.
If technological progress disproportionately empowers a minority and increases socioeconomic injustice, there is no true progress, merely increasingly elaborate repression and abuse

I don't have a problem with technology advancing. I have a problem with the goal of all this new shit just being to extract more money out of me while providing as minimal product as possible. An easy example being smartphones. The potential in functionality for them is insane but I can't buy one today that doesn't have less features than my 2016 model and I'm constantly fighting permissions bullshit any time I try to do anything fancy with it.

I fully agree. As a 43 year old, who used to be an "early adopter" I've found that I don't fucking need it. I'm fine with retro games. I'm fine with talking on the phone instead of video conferences. I don't need "social media".

On the other hand, I really like that my car doesn't pollute. I really like that I can power my house from the sunlight that normally just hits my roof and is absorbed. I really like that I can work from home.

There are tradeoffs. For me, what works, is just not giving a fuck. But in like, a content/nice way, instead of a nihilistic/depressed way. If you know what I mean?

But being a Luddite does have its appeal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

I still enjoy progress, but enshittification is exhausting.

I’ll keep it short, you got a lot of replies already. A lot of the tech is actually quite valuable and a lot of the promises of people like Elon Musk are, for lack of a better term, nearly complete horseshit.

What I’m personally exhausted by is how we’re doing all this and yet we can’t seem to bring ourselves to use it to help anyone. It isn’t the tech or the pace of development rather it’s the fact that we’ll triple someone’s productivity while keeping a five-day work-week with eight-hour days despite a mountain of studies and real-world examples showing how that’s not beneficial for anyone. So much of the development is going towards making the worst people more money and I fucking hate it so much.

I think you'd appreciate The Prisoner. One of the core themes of that show is the misuse of technology by the ruling class

The bicycle might have been a good place for us to stop.

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

The technological progress is what is not normal. Modern humans have been walking around, living their lives for 300,000 years. Agriculture is less than 12,000 years old, basically still brand new in comparison to the span of time that people just like us have existed for.

For nearly all of human history, generation after generation after generation for thousands of years lived very similar lifestyles with marginally improved, but familiar technology.

It is only in the last few hundred years, a tiny tiny sliver of the human timeline, that we have seen rapid technological progress that has completely changed the way people live their lives from one generation to the next. Lifestyle changes and paradigm shifts that used to take many many generations now are seemingly happening several times within an individual's lifetime.

We have barely even had any time to adapt to agriculture, let alone capitalism or air travel or instant global telecommunication or AI, etc. So don't be too hard on yourself about feeling fatigued. I feel it too. We are living in an alien world that we aren't really "meant for". You're "supposed to be" a hunter-gatherer.

Your feelings are of course valid, that's how you feel, and it's a perfectly normal thing. On the one hand technology keeps changing, but on the other hand people are trying to drum up money by selling promises of new technology as if it were snake oil.

All of the talk you hear about AI, it's 95% nonsense. Of course we can see some new cool toys, and we should be happy that we have new cool toys, but it's not like something totally magical has happened in the last 2 years, and it's not like something totally magical is going to happen in the next two years.

With all that in mind, you just got to take a break from the news, whenever you feel like it, and try to be open-minded about what the future will bring. A couple of decades from now is certainly going to be different from a couple of decades ago, and although that can be scary at times, remember that the same thing was true for our parents and their parents and their parents.