Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
Breaking through the illusion of convenience that's used to sell us automation
it continues to baffle me how many people either view tech as inherently bad or inherently always good, like holy shit how hard is it to recognize that some things are good and some bad, and that how something is used matters?
i like having a phone, it's very nice to not have to worry about being able to talk to people and getting lost in the forest, i like being able to find answers to questions without spending 4 hours at the library.
I wouldn't like being constantly contacted by people from my workplace, but that's not somehow the fucking phone's fault, that's the fault of it being societally and legally acceptable to harass people like that.societally and legally acceptable
Only because you allow it to be. It's either illegal or unacceptable in a lot of places
i know, i live in one of the places where the idea of your workplace contacting you outside of job hours is a very strange one.
That article's perspective sucks IMO. It is not the technology that is the problem in this case. The distance traveled to the meadow on foot versus the suburbs in the car had nothing to do with the technology or lack thereof. The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.
The fact is that this is cultural. You're willing to work a job that is an hour's drive away because you choose to take the job.
The one constant with technology is specialization. Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses. When noticeable shifts happen like with AI, many people groan at the additional burden of change. This has always and will always be the case, especially for people that are overworked and their livelihood put at risk from a technology they do not understand and struggle to learn. AI is especially troublesome because it is extremely complex and difficult to understand just under the surface of the near useless subscription services and basic publicly accessible tools.
Ultimately, the issue is cultural. You must stop working for free and stop treating corporate social media like a form of self promotion. I expect my job description to contractually state what my responsibilities are. If I answer phone calls for anything off the clock, I have a two hour minimum pay for my time. This culture of responsibility without compensation is a massive problem, as is acceptance of "it's just the way things are" mentality. Unplug from all corporate nonsense and think for yourself. Then push others to do the same. Only take a job that is close by, or move. Find a better job and don't accept abuse. It is a cultural problem.
Often it's a bit difficult to make an abstract point out of examples. You seem to be countering those examples with today's zeitgeist, the exact thing the article is looking to counter.
The person decided this was the normal they wanted and where they chose to live.
This would be true if all else were equal, but it isn't. Society built roads. It had to tear down housing to build the roads. The house prices went up because corporations bought up the housing stock and are using it to manipulate rents. None of that was the "choice" of the farmer. One cannot just opt out. "oh no thanks. I'll just take efficient public transport and we can just rip up the road network. Just give me one of the houses we build through more dense development."
Things are going to increase in complexity unless civilization collapses
Why? Many folks today are talking about making society resilient over efficient, with respect to COVID and supply chains. This is a direct ask for reducing complexity. The 15 minute city is an ask to reduce complexity. Complex societies fail.
Ultimately, the issue is cultural.
The issue is hegemony. Every company claiming to benefit you are building a fiefdom and you are the bricks. You can work around it but you have to beat the products and services you buy into submission. This is true of phones, computers, cars, TVs, subscriptions, AI, and increasingly how it asks more and more of us. People say "the things we own end up owning us" but no one says that about a fridge, or a washing machine.
The world without complexity was only able to feed around 2 billion humans. To suggest that the complexity supporting the modern world is unwanted or unneeded is to kill 6 billion people.
Are you an advocate for authoritarianism and the death of 6 billion humans to achieve the simplicity of the past? The vast majority of goods and trade are for food and the raw materials of life produced in the largest and only areas of the planet capable of sustaining this population.
Exactly. The author checks his mails at breakfast, promotes himself on insta while on vacation and works overtime. While folks in Europe try a 4-days work-week. The author clearly fails to recognize a cultural problem.
Have you considered that culture is merely the collective reaction of a group of humans to a given set of environmental conditions? I don't disagree with you, but you're needlessly simplifying the problem.
You’re willing to work a job that is an hour’s drive away because you choose to take the job.
Why did I choose to take the job? One major reason is that I have an automobile. If I didn't have the automobile, I wouldn't have been able to take the job. Culture comes about as a result of a series of incentives and motivations that shape human decisions. Change the access to technology, and you would change the culture.
You seem to believe that a solution will come from people simply choosing not to do certain things. This is partially true, but its more accurate to recognize that you need to first create the material conditions that enable people to actually have a viable choice.
It is not the technology that is the problem in this case.
It's the combination of the technology and the social structures that continually reproduce the culture that you're complaining about. If you think the culture is going to magically change without altering the material conditions first, you're gonna have a bad time.
To me, culture has more scope. If people refused to waste two hours a day commuting by the mental health disorder of the automobile, we would likely reshape zoning and housing to accommodate the population density required. This is longer term generational culture. It is hard for any of us to take the reigns of such a large scope. Ultimately the comprehensibility is irrelevant to the fact each of us only has one voting wallet. You either accept the way things are or you do not. Only you can change the culture you accept and live within. No one is born into an idealized circumstance that enables them. If you want the democratic freedoms of France you need to build and use a guillotine first. The people that do such a thing were not born into it. I'm not inciting violence. I am citing the magnitude of measurable change. No one is gong to make it easy for you. In this world people will exploit you in every way you are only barely willing to withstand. Ultimately it is impossible to set the bar of how much exploitation and abuse a population can or will withstand. That is not how society works. Governments do the minimum required to satisfy your collective community expectations enough to maintain power only. This minimum governance also involves letting business push people ad far as they can get away with before angering enough people of the wrong class to become a problem. Ultimately, you are the one that decides when to become a problem that gets attention in one way or another. You might try to become the person in power that does the minimum or you might take other avenues. However, your first and easiest vote is with your wallet. If you commit at this level, you will then feel far more motivated and vocal about the changes needed to create an acceptable culture you want to be a part of. You can't expect anyone to create a better world for you if you're not looking for one in the first place. The status que is the level of acceptable abuse with that bar set by others. You can't accept that bar if you want more or anything better.
culture is the collective reaction
No it's not. Iceland has a 4-days work-week, average annual working hours in Germany are 1.3k, in France 1.5k, in the US 1.7k
This is like if France had a 4.5-days work-week and Germany a 4-days work-week. Are those countries lacking the level of technological advancement that US has?
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours
As someone who's stuck with doing the automation, it definitely doesn't make my life easier. Or faster. It's just stressful, full of boring complexity and annoying. First world problems, I know.
It makes it easier to produce more garbage. Guess who has to clean it up? E.g. ai produces thousands of copies in a ridiculously short amount of time, but humans spend more time vetting it.
I walk into a Walmart and buy a thingamabob. I get to at least inspect the package for damage first, then pay for it and walk out in ~30 minutes or so.
I order something from an online source, I don't get to inspect the product first, I gotta wait a day or three or whatever, and there's no guarantee I won't have to send it back because of damage, wrong size, wrong color, whatever...
Tell me, which one is faster again?
Edit: You also got porch pirates out there...
Not to mention if you order dongle A for item B, it's your fault for entering it that way. For this reason alone, I like in person hardware store visits. In Asia we have a downsizing problem in that foreign workers man the aisles, so they generally don't know stuff, but there's usually an old guy around if you ask a bit.
Well, the thing is, it could make it easier but not whilst under those who want to control with it.
Technology is not inherently bad or good, it is a tool and like all tools, those who design and make it can do so for more control or less control.
If technology was truly in the hands of the people, everything was open source, changeable and collaborative then it would make our lives better.
Currently it can't and won't in all ways.
Yes. Its faster and easier now to make a payment if you give the company rights to bill you whatever they want whenever and directly pull it from your account but boy are they resistant to sending a bill and then having it billed and you pushing the payment from your banks billpay and such.
Pretty sure it adds a few layers of complexity technically making it harder.
Drag wishes drag could finish the day's work and go home faster...