at least when it comes to consumer tech
like i can't even remember the last time i was excited for a new tech thing. maybe my second smart phone, i guess? that one was at least a big improvement from my first one. third was marginally better, and then the fourth, which i'm using now, i feel like i only got because of planned obsolescence (slow down/battery problems etc.)
it's such a stark contrast from growing up in the 90s/early 2000s
are you sure this isn't just a result of becoming left-wing
i see technology advancing all around me all the time---and while some part of my brain can recognise cool applications in some of it--all i see is the ever advancing march of corporate surveillance and profit extraction. technology that doesn't benefit the worker fucking sucks!
i am a luddite 1000000000 smashed self-checkout kiosks
it's partially due to old age, partially due to left wing, but it's also partially true
the rapid tech advances of the 90s and 2000s are over
What they've been able to do in the 2010s was I guess take that same stuff and make it smaller, leading to a smartphone revolution, which again, is itself much less "exciting" than the computing revolution of the 90s/00s
What they're doing now is even less consequential than that. And also in tandem, simultaneously while all this is happening, the goals/forces making these things happen are becoming more privatized/exploitative/profiteering, which makes them worse quality as well (No removable batteries, games as service, bloated websites bc they need trackers and ads and cryptominers etc et al)
id argue if you think this the problem is looking in the same places. AI and robotics are getting better quite rapidly and impressively. computing isnt exploding in the same way it used to but lots of technologies settle into steadier, slower progress at some point. trains havent continually been improving at a breakneck pace since their introduction but they certainly had a period of phenomenal improvement back when they were introduced
and not to get moral relativist but the bloat and financialisation and all attached to current 'innovation' is a kind of progress. it doesnt serve social good, its awful for us as non-owners---but figuring out how to do it is a task and involves making technology more efficient at its purpose. some of which is probably useable in not-evil ways should the people get their hands on it
yea true, but then again I don't know much about AI/robotics so I can't judge. And actually, the reason I don't know much about them is exactly why I'm sort of right--most people will never use a robot, and almost never use an AI. So even if these things are improving at the breakneck pace of the 90s RAM/CPU/Graphics capabilities, basically nobody would notice
Nobody except capital that is, who will then use these AIs to make every website you've ever logged onto worse, and engineer ever-more-convoluted ways to kill poor and non-white people
Basically yea, if you had a value for "tech advances" and then multiplied it by a modifier of "social goodness" it would now be almost zero for the 1st world (although some raw amount of it is still being seen by the 3rd world simply because they were forced to be behind)
you might be using these things much sooner than you think. ive already been forced by some acquantinces to be in the same room as an alexa, we all had fun with that Dall-E shit and the private one is way way better. consumer-side drones have gone from fancy toys to a staple of filmmaking (and surveillance and killing people).
well i shouldnt say 'using' so much as 'be forced to interface with them through their invasions of public space & the workplace'
deleted by creator
i think we're just getting old, I don't know. In the first 20 years of my life I went from listening to music on spools of magnetic tape that maxxed out at 80 minutes to a device that plays every song ever made, downloaded in seconds. I can't point to anything after like 2007 to now that's been a monumental shift like that.
streaming is super cool! even cooler when done by pirates!
yeah streaming and piracy is really cool and I wish it had existed as a kid. I guess piracy back then was copying one of your friend's mixtapes.
i'm a luddite, i still download all my music from soulseek
someday if i have money maybe i'll have something new to share there
Self-checkout is a blessing in a store that stubbornly refuses to hire anyone at the front.
Fuck your single 15 items or less line. I'll just do this shit myself.
its self-fulfilling understaffing prophecy
I mean, I agree in theory. But also, even before the self-checkout, you always have twice as many kiosks as staff on any given day.
the fundamental problem is as you pointed out, a refusal to hire sufficient staff. no matter how much labor saving tech they install/offload labor to customers---they just lower the staff and replicate the same structural imbalance. self-checkout doesn't deliver a smoother consumer-end experience, or alleviate pressure on the workers---it just gives management a reason to not have another checker or two. and a way to put a security camera in your face for analytics/surveillance