I’ve just been reading about how in the future, AI will allow us to speak with animals, and people will be able to communicate telepathically and live in their own VR worlds. (etc., etc.)
Man, this isn’t a world I want to live in. I’m so tired of the constant paradigm shifting that you have to put your brain through with each innovation. I wish technology just stayed frozen in the 1980s – there would be so much less uncertainty in my life and I could just focus on being a human.
Innovation keeps being forced on you and I just feel tired. >!And I’m only just in my 20s!< Is this ok? Is this valid? When resisting it is a loser’s game…
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.
Are you mad about the technology or the underlying reasons it was born of? Honestly most people’s anger towards tech isn’t about the tech itself, but what it’s really used for
For example, the smart fridge, on paper most people would find it a fantastic idea. But then the user-hostile features set in. An internal camera could helpfully analyze everything in your fridge and put together an ez shopping list, but then in reality we kinda get that because it was designed around things like selling data collection and ADs and then designed to break in a year or 2 and take out half the fridge along with it because they want to make more money off you every 2 years
Now take the smart fridge in a world with strong privacy and consumer protection laws (and maybe even a capitalism free world) and it would be totally different, not only would you get cool things designed properly with heart and soul, but it’ll also last a long time. Modern tech doesn’t have to be as fragile as it is, NASAs space probes and rovers and satellites prove time and time again that “High Tech” can last with proper design and manufacturing. In the depths of space their shit is routinely lasting their original mission lengths. In space, in the top 10 most hostile places we know.
So much anger, so much vulgarity. This is exactly how I describe each of these things. It’s fucking maddening. Add in resentment for another fucking app that, surprise, is a mediocre service disguising more marketing collection. But I’m the crazy one because I don’t want to just let it happen
Yep
This is what I’m on about, resisting is a loser’s game, even if you try it gets too hard :-(
Ah, well noticed. Yeah I guess a lot of the smart toasters etc is just the industry throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. You just reminded me how quickly 3D TVs disappeared after appearing.
Tell that to society 😩
But yes, we are definitely on the same page.
I think that the best way to get a smart tv is with a big monitor and a small raspberry pi, it makes sense and you have complete control over the hardware, rejecting anti-comsumer tactics is way better than rejecting technology