
Ask HN: What are unintended consequences of new tech you've noticed? - coloneltcb
3 times in SF this week, a Cruise AV has driven past my car and triggered my automatic windshield wipers, even though it was totally dry out. (probably the LIDAR interacting with wipers&#x27; infrared sensors).<p>Got me thinking about what unintended consequences can spring up because of new technologies. Anyone have other examples, current or historic?
======
mattlondon
My favourite one that surprised me and continues to surprise people: kids that
have grown up with smartphones and iPads from birth are computer illiterate.

People see their 5 year old using an iPad and the knee-jerk cliche
thought/assumption us the classic "oh wow these kids just _get_ technology!"
(recall all the "I need my kid to program the VCR" type stuff from the 80s/90s
- it is the same thing of older people assuming current children innately
understand the current tech)

Yet while today's kids may know how to stab at a screen to get videos of Peppa
pig to play, there are people starting to come through to their mid and late
teens who don't know how to use a mouse and keyboard with any level of
dexterity, or don't know what a "file" is or what folders/directories are etc
because that is all hidden away on an iPad. As a result they struggle to do
even the most basic tasks that we all take for granted... and they don't get
taught because everyone thinks they already know it having grown up with an
iPad in their pram.

I chuckle to my self sometimes when I see a toddler walk up to a TV or video
advert and try touching it a few times, then walk away confused because what
they thought was a touch screen isn't doing anything when they touch it.

Fascinating.

~~~
tracer4201
Not a parent yet, but I certainly don’t plan on giving my kid a touch
device... certainly not with internet access. I grew up using the internet as
a 90s kid. Today, the internet is even more messed up.

~~~
danieldk
Our 5yo has an iPod Touch to play music. But she also has a Linux PC (she
enjoys typing things and playing gcompris). But probably our best purchase is
a Micro:Bit. Her programs are still simple, but it’s clear how much she enjoys
being creative and that she can make the Micro:Bit do what she wants.

We are not forcing her to use tech in any way. The Linux PC and Micro:Bit are
just there and it’s up to her own curiosity to explore them when she feels
like it.

I think the problem is that TV and iPads are convenient for parents. You can
put your kid behind one, and they’ll occupy themselves for hours. Whereas with
real computers, Micro:Bits, or even Lego, you have to help them understand.

------
unlinked_dll
Internet usage starts with users querying information they want, and services
learning/adapting to deliver information in a format/context based on their
activity. This has created some stellar search tools, a personalized network
of services and communities available to people, and made the internet a
paradise for new content from all over the world.

Despite that all the information in the world is available to us, we only seek
out what we want to see/hear/read and then get fed new information based on
those queries. It doesn't lead to free exchange of ideas and values, it has
created polarized societies where we are digitally segregated by our own sense
of identity and community.

People talk a lot about the political side of this, the "echo chambers"
online. But I think it's worse than that. We see racial segregation on
Twitter, feedback loops of content on YouTube that reinforce themselves, news
outlets tailoring their content for users that reach them from their own site
and optimizing for usage metrics that feed usage metrics... and we all are in
love with it.

It reminds me of _Farenheit 451_ in the sense that this almost-dystopia wasn't
created by some fascist dictator or single-party state; we built it ourselves.
We wanted it.

That's not to say there isn't beauty on the internet, and we live in an era
where more people talk and share and love and fight more than ever with
language and ideas. It's just a strange departure from where most futurists
thought we were going to be.

~~~
godelski
> We wanted it.

I'm not entirely convinced this is accurate. It definitely is in part, but not
in whole. We wanted these better search tools and we like recommendation
systems. But I know a lot of people are frustrated with algorithms like
YouTube's recommendation system trapping them. (e.g. watch one Joe Rogan video
and you get firehosed with more JRE videos). The thing is we also don't notice
that this reinforcement also pushes us away from one another. But the solution
sounds very similar to the solution to the complaint. People are complaining
about being walled in by the algorithm (I for one am one of those people).
People are asking for new suggestions. As in new topics, not just other
youtubers doing the same thing. I think the difference is that it has become
so obvious now that we're noticing and saying "wait, that'd too far."

~~~
zonidjan
I would love, so much, for Youtube to just stop targeting recommendations. At
least then I'd see new things once in a while...

~~~
mackrevinack
ive started to use freetube on desktop and newpipe on mobile. they are not
great for discovery at all but at least I can watch the odd [insert-channel-i-
dont-really-like-here] video every once in a blue moon without then being
harassed for weeks/months/years after to watch more from the same channel

~~~
brokenmachine
I've always opened youtube in a new private window to do that, especially for
sports that I'm interested in but I don't want to get spoilers for later.

I think it works because I don't see those topics in my feeds.

------
imoverclocked
Noise.

Auditory: I can't tell you how accustomed to hearing stuff constantly everyone
is. Cars (even just the tires on a busy street), Air Handling, Refrigerators,
Beeping timers (ovens/microwaves/calendar reminders).

Visual: Web notifications, web advertisements, billboards, "news," spam phone
calls/texts.

Social: Many people have an expectation that sending a message entitles them
to an immediate response. In the age of quick answers from Google, people
often forget about slowing down for the speed of thought.

Mental: We (humans) can only make so many decisions in a day yet we are
overwhelmed with false dichotomies constantly in order to choose one or the
other of basically the same thing.

~~~
mauli
I came across more bird scare devices [0] lately and most are at ~19-23kHz at
-20~30dB (personal measures, device ranges differ). I can hear them and it
hurts. Fortunarely they are mainly only deployed near entrances and do not
have a broad field of effect. Would be interesting to know how many people do
not hear this and feel kinda weird/sick while standing at those places for a
longer period of time.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scare...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_scarer#Ultrasonic_scarers)

~~~
jackcodes
I’d run across these all over Tokyo, practically unavoidable on most walks.
The worst ones were when you’d be queuing for a ramen for upwards of 30
minutes but you’d be unable to do anything about it.

------
gorgoiler
Journey time calculations in Google maps, Uber etc. mean no one I know is ever
on time.

If you need to be somewhere at 8:30 and the journey “takes 17 minutes”, one
psychologically sets 8:13 as the deadline for leaving the house. You pick up
your keys at 8:13, actually leave a few minutes later, hit traffic or take a
wrong turn or two, and end up crossing the threshold at your destination
fifteen minutes late.

It’s no big deal and quite a grumpy old man thing to say, and I also don’t
know if tech is the root cause, but squeezing travel into unrealistically
small and algorithmically created windows of time has killed most people’s
sense of punctuality, including mine if I’m not careful.

~~~
pbosko
Google's estimation for my country is always less than what is achievable if
you stick to the speed limit. I guess they calculate it based on other
drivers.

~~~
onion2k
In practical terms speeding actually makes very little difference to your
journey time.

Eg if you have a 100 mile drive on a 70mph road and you drive the entire way
at 85mph your reward is saving about 10 minutes on a 1.5 hour trip.

The downside risk is getting charged for speeding and being delayed for much
more than 10 minutes.

I've never though the cost/benefit shows it to be particularly worthwhile.

~~~
FDSGSG
There are exceptions to this though. If you're driving through Europe at night
you can easily spend most of your trip on highways safely going 180kmh or
faster, saving you many hours on longer trips.

~~~
jaclaz
By Europe you are meaning Germany only, I believe, in most other European
countries there is a speed limit of 130 km/h or 140 km/h, day or night doesn't
matter:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_by_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_by_country)

~~~
capableweb
To be precise it's 120 km/h in most, 130 km/h in some. At least in
western/northern Europe (except Germany of course, with it's Authoban)

~~~
jaclaz
Yep, but it doesn't change the "base" point, which is, you cannot legally
drive faster than 120/130/140 kmh (depending on the country) and certainly NOT
180 kmh in any European country BUT in Germany (and only on some - many -
strerches of the Autobahn, in some other there is anyway a speed limit of
120/130/140 kmh):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Germany](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_Germany)

[http://www.autobahnatlas-online.de/Limitkarte.pdf](http://www.autobahnatlas-
online.de/Limitkarte.pdf)

[http://www.autobahnatlas-
online.de/LegendeLimit.pdf](http://www.autobahnatlas-
online.de/LegendeLimit.pdf)

------
AnimalMuppet
Motion-sensing automatic doors can be opened by deer, bears (which has led to
some excitement in hotels and hospitals), and even birds. I've seen birds that
can activate the doors in the hardware store near me, and that know where the
birdseed is on the shelves in the garden department.

~~~
kkarakk
yup my favorite story of animals adapting to human environments is dogs riding
subways in Russia
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJf2L2B5fY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJf2L2B5fY)

~~~
zupa-hu
Hilarious :)

------
JDiculous
Depression. People are spending the majority of their lives staring at a
screen, and then wondering why they're depressed.

In the moment it might not feel lonely. Exchanging DMs and posting on Reddit /
HN / social media might feel like real communication. But ultimately there's a
sense of emptiness to it, and it can't substitute real flesh-to-flesh human
connection.

But it feels like we're always expected to be on our "grind", always bettering
ourselves in an increasingly competitive labor market, so it's harder to go
offline and just enjoy life because there's always that lingering sense of
guilt that one is being left behind in our collective arms race to...nowhere.

~~~
WilliamEdward
This is the exact position i am in right now. I crave the outside world and
human contact like a drug. I am not clinically depressed, just in a state of
constant longing for social interaction. I keep telling myself my work will
allow me to one day enjoy the outside, ironic really.

~~~
shantly
If you don't have to have home Internet service and an Internet-connected
phone for work... shut off those services.

It's fine. There's more stuff to do without the Internet than a person can
reasonably do, anyway, even if you're pretty picky.

~~~
greggman2
I find that advice hard to accept. I'm older so I spent plenty of time as an
adult without the internet (unless you count BBSes). I use the internet to
find things to do. Meetups to go to, events on facebook, events and parties
friends invite me to, restaurants to go do, etc... I don't know how I would do
it without the internet at this point. Maybe it used to be I'd look in the
local paper like SF Weekly or LA Weekly but I live in a place that doesn't
have those anymore and AFAIK even those are a pale version of what they were
in the 80s and 90s

~~~
shantly
Well if it's _helping_ you socialize, don't take that advice. Everyone's
different. I'd ditch it if I could (for work reasons, for me and for my
spouse, I cannot) but then texting is the most technological thing I really
_need_ to keep in touch these days, and maybe the occasional e-mail check-in
or phone call, and entertainment and diversion's laughably abundant even
without it so that's not a concern. If I were finding meetups and such on the
Internet that'd be different.

------
muzani
We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity.
Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like
Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much
better.

We've learned that data is unreliable. The highest click through rates come
from nudity, or totally gross things like gore and trypophobia triggering
holes. The highest CTR on text comes from well, clickbait. At this point
everyone realizes this but some still don't notice that data-driven decisions
optimizes for weird things.

IOT doesn't scale as well as we thought, because hardware doesn't scale at the
rate of web software that we're used to. So hardware companies do more poorly
than expected. Replace "hardware" with anything else that's hard to upgrade,
and you get software-other hybrids like Uber and WeWork which didn't scale as
well as anticipated.

~~~
concordDance
> We've learned that better tools doesn't actually create more productivity.
> Lots of people talk about how they dread email. A singular mega tool like
> Facebook or Evernote isn't great. Lots of disparate little tools isn't much
> better.

I'm struggling to figure out what you mean by this.

Obviously it's not literally true (I've saved my colleagues thousands of hours
with some of the tools I've made), but I can't figure out what else you could
mean.

~~~
muzani
I think it's more like some people walk in the office, comment and tag on
Trello, reply emails, deal with messages on Slack, convert and forward files
on Dropbox. Then it's lunch.

After lunch, they reply to some more emails, take a meeting on Zoom (waiting
half an hour for that one guy to fix his microphone). Then they have 1 hour of
work before the evening scrum stand-up, which is done on Slack or Zoom because
half the team is remote.

But the CEO doesn't use Slack and his inbox is always full, so we forward him
a report on WhatsApp, which has to be converted to PDF, which he then manually
puts in his Prezi presentation for a client meeting tonight.

~~~
concordDance
This doesn't match any officd I've worked in, nor any office anyone I know has
worked in.

~~~
lazyhummingbird
Then you're an exceptional person among exceptional people. While it's a no-
brainer that tech tools bring us utility, there is a nontrivial time, thought,
and effort cost to engaging with nearly any tool. Sometimes that cost
outweighs the advantage of the tool or feeds behaviors that are
counterproductive. A great example of this. The younger half of my ad agency
is on Slack. The older half tried it but it just wouldn't take. The young
people are productive together, but their habitual Slacking becomes a
distraction when they have teams with more seniors than juniors. The tool
unintentionally created a divide. Every solution has costs and benefits like
anything else. Iatrogenesis. I've definitely seen offices get so overtooled
that they resemble what the above person was saying.

------
carapace
Not _exactly_ the same kind of thing, maybe, but I love London's accidental
solar furnace.

"This London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire"

[https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-
skyscrap...](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-skyscraper-
can-melt-cars-set-buildings-fire-f8C11069092)

------
sethammons
As tech gets more and more advanced and we get higher and higher levels of
abstraction, I've noticed more and more programmers just don't understand
_what_ their code is doing. There can be a lack of understanding of how calls
translate to system calls and machine instruction. The abstraction is good, it
allows you to do more and do it quickly. But when you don't understand what
the abstraction is, then you are programming by coincidence and errors are
more confusing than they should be.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
I should write a medium article on the questions we asked during interviewing
and what the success rate was for each question (spoiler: it was depressing).

~~~
sethammons
I'd be interested in that!

------
11thEarlOfMar
'I'm being tracked' paranoia.

I have to force myself to stop thinking about the ways may daily activities
can be tracked. I find myself feeling increasingly paranoid, especially when
reminded that my actions are available to faceless people and how they help to
train systems that then exploit my 'humanness'. In fact, I imagine they will
get so good that they not only exploit me, but use that very humanness to veil
the fact they are exploiting me!

Now, back to re-watching Silicon Valley before the season premier.

~~~
greggman2
Yes! I hate being tracked watching videos. I have a self identity I want to
put forward. I hate being judged differently based on what I watch. For this
reason there are plenty of shows I don't watch via streaming. If I really want
to watch I'll find another way. If it's youtube I'll do it not logged in (it's
possible it's still attributed to me but I doubt it).

It's illegal for a video rental company to share your watch list. I'm not sure
that covers Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Youtube, etc.. I suspect they don't share
the list though, they just put you in categories and sell marketing to those
categories. That still bugs me since I'm being judged.

OSes and stores spying on app usage is the same. I've never checked out any of
the more risque games or VR apps because I'll be tracked.

~~~
psv1
> (it's possible it's still attributed to me but I doubt it).

It's still attributed to you.

~~~
greggman2
can you prove that or is it just another conspiracy theory?

~~~
Nextgrid
They fingerprint your browser, IP address and usage history. I can bring back
my entire YouTube recommendations (many completely unrelated subjects) even in
a private browsing window by watching just one or two videos (I guess it isn't
sure at first whether I'm the same person or someone else, but one or two
videos, combined with IP address is enough for them to be reasonably confident
it's me and bring back my previous recommendations).

~~~
greggman2
I'm not using the same IP address nor the same browser. I've never seen my
recommendations being remotely similar. When I view logged out via another
browser in private mode all I get are the generic "popular in your region"
videos.

I also never notice the videos I'm watching logged out affecting my
recommendations when logged in. That doesn't mean I'm not being tracked but
without actual proof I'll continue to consider it mostly a conspiracy theory.

------
flyinghamster
One of the big things for me is the demise of trustworthiness in just about
everything. Extremely cheap phone calls plus Caller ID spoofing has made the
telephone almost useless (raise your hand if you only answer callers in your
contact list!), email has never been trustworthy, and the internet has made it
possible for hoaxes to spread farther and faster than ever.

~~~
muzani
There's an app for that: Truecaller. It crowdsources who is calling.

~~~
munmaek
Why would I hand over my contact info to some app?

~~~
muzani
Because everyone else has done it for you. It's no worse than LinkedIn but
actually useful.

------
HankB99
I have a small device in my pocket that provides access to nearly the sum
total of human knowledge. I use it to get into pointless arguments with people
I don't know and look at pictures of cats. (I wish I could claim that as
original but it is something I read on the Internet. Between cats. :-/ )

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Lol, I've been telling my kids for years, "I hold in my hand the accumulated
knowledge of mankind."

~~~
omarchowdhury
Well, you hold access to it, not the knowledge itself.

~~~
dorgo
You don't have a copy of wikipedia on your phone?

~~~
omarchowdhury
Wikipedia doesn't include everything, but I get your point.

------
iamben
Something I've noticed a huge amount over the last couple of years in
particular - no one has any change for the homeless / those on the streets /
those collecting for charity. Contactless has been a 'thing' for a while now,
but it really seemed to kick up a gear when phones and watches had wallets and
the buses and a decent amount of restaurants went 'card only'.

~~~
officeplant
Having been almost 100% cashless for the last decade it's only a matter of
time before homeless people use contactless payments as an attempt to defeat
my excuses.

~~~
cookie_monsta
You're going to have to start saying "I don't have that app"

[https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/08/barcode-
donatio...](https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2018/08/barcode-donations-
rough-sleepers-combat-cashless-society/)

------
danschumann
I'm miserable and all the tech that has "enabled me to do anything" has made
everything seem arbitrary. If you can do anything, why do anything?

~~~
danschumann
I used to own music. Now I have all the music, but also none of it.

~~~
KozmoNau7
I ditched streaming services a while ago, because I was fed up with the lousy
curation of their catalogues and the tendency for albums to randomly disappear
and reappear based on licensing disagreements.

Now I'm back to a ~25K track FLAC library and a small collection of LPs for
fun. It's backed up to a NAS, to a cloud storage account and to a portable
drive I keep in my locker at work. Nobody gets to take the music from me.

~~~
joe-collins
I've moved to purchasing music _only_ on Bandcamp, where I get the option of
downloading every purchase in the format of my choice (and offers artists an
85/15 profit split!).

And, after one adverse incident, I am very diligent about exercising that
download option. Turns out, artists can withdraw themselves and their music
from the platform at any time, which leaves customers without access...
mostly. For some reason, I still have access to that music on my phone, though
I haven't tested whether that's only thanks to the local cache.

~~~
KozmoNau7
I do the same thing, download as FLAC and store locally.

There are two options for artists/labels on Bandcamp if they want to remove an
album from sale, for whatever reason.

One is to deactivate the album, which removes it from public view, but keeps
it in the backend, so people who bought it still have it in their collections.

The other is the "nuclear option" of completely deleting the album everywhere,
which also takes it away from the people who bought it.

While I can understand why they need to have the latter option, probably for
legal reasons, I do find it troubling that something I've bought can just be
arbitrarily taken away from me.

It really should be impossible to completely delete content from Bandcamp,
without contacting them first. It should _not_ be an option directly in the
artist/label control panel.

------
lewiscollard
Optimising for "engagement". I don't think, at least to start with, that
Machiavellian intentions were behind it. But it turned out that optimising for
the thing that got the most likes, the most retweets, the most emotional
reactions, and the most views from people was a shit way of deciding what
information should propagate the furthest.

That is a paperclip maximiser. I don't think we, collectively, have fully come
to terms with how damaging it is.

~~~
cellularmitosis
There was a great series of talks a few years ago called “is anything worth
maximizing?”. Unfortunately, the videos seem to be down, but his medium post
is still up: [https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-
maximizin...](https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-
maximizing-d11e648eb56f)

------
MiddleEndian
The weaknesses of the phone system are being exploited and exposed.
Telemarketers have learned they can just put whatever they want on their
caller ID with zero verification, including the phone numbers of random local
individuals. If the FCC and/or the phone companies don't start forwarding
originator information so spammers can effectively be blocked by any user, the
phone system will (and deserves to) fail. At least among my friend group, most
of us don't have each other's numbers, we communicate on chat apps.

~~~
flyinghamster
It's gotten worse lately. I'm seeing calls allegedly from Citi, Capital One,
etc., that have the identical credit card scam spiel. They go nowhere (but get
recorded), since I've used Asterisk to put a CAPTCHA in the way. My "landline"
(actually VoIP now) stays blissfully quiet. If it actually rings, I know it's
a human...

~~~
lowpro
Do you have a link or guide on where to start with this? It sounds like
something that would be really useful!

------
kylecazar
The world's tourist must-see spots are seeing an unmanagable spike in foot
traffic.

~~~
qeternity
As an expat all of my life, I’ve really noticed this in the last 5 years. It’s
also extremely hypocritical because I find myself walking around in places I
have lived before, or been to many times, and feeling angry at the “tourists”
ruining it.

~~~
buboard
As someone who lives in a pop tourist place, my reaction is less about being
angry, it s more ‘what the hell are they all doing here’. It feels like those
lines outside shops on black friday that i used to see on US TV. How can it be
‘cool’ to travel when everybody’s doing it?

~~~
qeternity
I grew up in West LA, which is now overrun with tourists, largely Asian. So I
feel it both in places that I have a reason to be in, but also in places which
I feel I'm more entitled to than others.

------
40four
I've heard this topic come up before. I belive it is interesting and valuable
to think about.

I don't have much to contribite of the top of my head, but I did stumble
across this blog a while back (it might have actually been from here on HN,
don't remember) that explores this very topic.

It's even named after it :) maybe other will enjoy it. I like the author's
writing style, usually a pleasure to read.

[https://unintendedconsequenc.es](https://unintendedconsequenc.es)

~~~
paulorlando
Hey, glad you like my writing!

~~~
40four
There he is!

------
kliao
Historically, misinformation spread due to lack of reliable communications
technology (news took a while to travel around the world). Now, misplaced
trust in media and abuse of technology spread misinformation.

~~~
ltbarcly3
I was just thinking about this the other day, in the context of ancient texts
referring to things being written down. You come across phrases in ancient
accounts like "it is written ....", and in a world where almost all
information and news came from word of mouth and rumors, something being
written down made it inherently more credible.

Today everything is written down, much if not most of the information we
receive is via written documents, especially online. There is a level of bias
and intentional misleading that is often hard to believe. Hearing something
from a well informed friend seems far more credible than a news story now,
since you can't depend on journalists to research and relate the available
information without intentionally withholding, minimizing, or amplifying to
create a narrative that is in line with what they want people to believe.

I'm not screaming 'fake news' here. An example would be an NPR story that
claimed a certain person, previously employed in a professional field, was
'unable to find work' for 6 years. Clearly the person had struggled with
substance abuse, but that was never mentioned, and the narrative was 'In This
Economy' despite the fact that if you show up drunk to job interviews that is
an essential fact in a human interest story about a person being unable to
find work. The journalist and/or their editors wanted to write a story about
how hard it is to find a job 'in this economy', so they hid facts that didn't
reinforce that narrative.

~~~
lostcolony
Well, "it is written" was also a statement about the credibility due to an
inherent bias towards the educated. Yes, you can't necessarily trust a
journalist...but you certainly can't trust a friend's opinion either; they
aren't even expected to be well informed.

~~~
ltbarcly3
I said "a well informed friend". Certainly it is a tautology that a 'well
informed friend' can be expected to be 'well informed', no?

------
agnimurthy
The platform economics of streaming services incentivizes musicians to release
a larger quantity of short, catchier singles that work well in playlists,
instead of putting out a sonically diverse album.

~~~
Eremotherium
At the same time it's never been easier for producers of niche art to find
their audience and capitalize on it, simply because the cost of production and
distribution is nearing zero and there are basically no more gatekeepers (in
the traditional sense).

------
maxk42
Interest-driven communities online paired with censorship lead people to
increasingly radical points of view. Before social media, people were forced
to interact and get along with people with varying points of view. Now, we
choose to isolate ourselves into groups of like-minded individuals where
dissent is silenced, leading people to believe that extremism is normal.

~~~
abtinf
So the world was free of bigotry prior to social media?

Does it matter what one is extreme about? Shouldn’t we be extreme on certain
issues, like the difference between food and cyanide?

~~~
ipython
It's a matter of scale; before social media, small groups would be isolated
due to difficulty in "finding" each other. Now it's just a quick google search
away.

The other part of that "scale" is that these fringe views are presented with
the same facade of authority as a more mainstream view. Generally speaking,
something like Google will present the search results in a non-biased way...
so googling for "flat earth" will bring up links, just as "moon landing"
would. So to a naive viewer, "Google" is approving of the idea of a "flat
earth", if that makes sense...

------
ratsimihah
I was just thinking on the tube how Steve Jobs wanted to put a computer on
everyone's desks, but he ended up putting one in everyone's hands and now
we're all crooked and staring down like Quasimodo.

------
peterhadlaw
Semi-related to the Cruise AV, but should we be worried about a sudden
increase in LIDAR everywhere from the perspective of protecting eyesight? I
understand there are regulations and such to limit the "power" of the light,
so just looking for more info.

~~~
ISL
If the vendors are complying with known safe-power limits (sub mW laser
power), it should be fine.

One should primarily be concerned with laser powers that unintentionally
exceed design power, or if they're ultra-fast lasers, with the peak power.

~~~
jrootabega
Do those limits take into account multiple sources hitting your eye at once?
Maybe with laser pulses the odds of that happening for any length of time is
nil

------
nperez
For me, tech has turned into a crutch when I don't know what to do. I've
caught myself in the middle of automatic behavior and it's a bit scary -
opening Reddit or HN, closing it because I've already read everything on the
front page, then opening it again a few seconds later without even thinking
about it.

I wonder what I would be doing without it. Creating art? Going out? I'd have
to do something. It's something I want to explore more. Maybe I'll schedule
just an hour each day where every device is turned off.

~~~
mherdeg
Yishan Wong's response to that worry starts out:

> The pre-internet era was boring. Some may say that it was just as
> stimulating but in different, more "vibrant, outdoorsy" ways, but they are
> wrong. I have lived in both and the internet definitely makes life more
> interesting. In fact, combining the outdoors with the internet is one of
> life's greatest pleasures.

[https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-
the...](https://www.quora.com/How-did-people-waste-their-time-in-the-pre-
Internet-era/answer/Yishan-Wong)

I'm not sure I'm convinced but it was an interesting very short essay.

~~~
shantly
I feel _really_ relaxed and not bored at all when I go on vacation somewhere
my phone gets little or no reception. It's amazing. There's so much to do
without the Internet! Books are a thing, and there's more than enough top-
notch fiction to last a lifetime, _without_ re-reading. Writing is a thing.
Sketching. Hell offline video games are a thing, for that matter, and you can
mine the back catalogs of older consoles for (mostly) less money than
something new, and have about the same amount of fun. You can keep yourself in
more excellent video material than you can reasonably watch with a Netflix DVD
subscription and a trip to the library every week, no Internet required (aside
from managing your Netflix queue, I guess—do that on your library trips, when
you pay your bills). Board games & tabletop games & card games rule. Inventing
any of those is fun. Lawn games. Sports. Playing music. Listening to music.
Building stuff in the garage. Programming in any language/ecosystem with
decent offline documentation. Hardware stuff.

I only, _only_ have Internet service because it lets me work from home and
keeps my wife from having to stay at school until 7:00 4 nights a week for
9ish months a year (teacher) since friggin' everything they do is online now
(Google, mostly). I mean I have a couple streaming services and such since we
have to pay for Internet service anyway, but aside from those two (admittedly
great) things that require it I wouldn't bother to pay for it.

~~~
zonidjan
That's the thing. That's never changed. Vacations have _always_ been more fun.
The change is that now, when you're doing boring mundane things, you can pull
out your phone and have at least some modicum of entertainment.

~~~
shantly
I mean chillin’ in an Airbnb, not hiking or seeing the sights or whatever.
Even that part’s better, without the Internet.

[EDIT] and yes I get the irony that AirBnB requires the Internet. Occasional
Internet is handy to take care of necessities and create convenience. Constant
Internet? I'm a skeptic.

------
diego_moita
Like social networks breeding political stupidity, mob rule and demagoguery?

~~~
ghoshbishakh
Exactly. Political parties spend most on social networking teams now! look at
India! Entire elections are based on fake news spread on social networks.
Nobody cares about healthcare, economy, jobs and of course education.
Obviously if you educate people then they will start judging everything
rationally just like we are doing on this thread ;)

------
paulorlando
Great question. I've been writing about this broad topic for a while. There
are 50+ examples here:
[https://unintendedconsequenc.es/](https://unintendedconsequenc.es/) I hope
you enjoy reading them. (One of my favorites was on AVs.)

------
amiga_500
Computers have made tracking huge quantities of debt feasible which itself is
sold as collateral which exists only electronically, allowing private banks to
issue usd credit irrespective of the fed.

This has made land prices track productivity, leaving most on the breadline
forever.

~~~
maest
Im sorry, can you expand on how your first assertion leads to your second?

~~~
amiga_500
Land prices where demand > supply (most purchases) are bid up by credit, so
available credit sets prices.

------
krapp
I'm sitting in front of a device that will let me peruse what is practically
the collected sum of all human knowledge, play all the games, watch all the
movies, listen to all the music, communicate in realtime in multimedia with
anyone, anywhere in the world, almost all for free, and will send a pizza to
my house if I'm hungry.

And I'm still bored.

~~~
drdeadringer
Perhaps an evolution of the "true joke" that there are 1500 television
channels and nothing to watch.

------
tropo
Younger people are less likely to be able to deal with directories. (er,
"folders", and get off my lawn) They are also less clear about what is on the
local machine.

They use iOS and Android. They don't use a file manager, and certainly don't
use a command line.

Chromebooks are now common in education. Stuff goes on the Google drive.

This is causing trouble when these people end up needing to use traditional
desktop software in college or in the workplace. They have trouble with saving
files, moving files, and making backups.

~~~
blendo
They just haven't yet figured out everything behind

    
    
      ./a.out

------
ksec
USB-C, the intention of one port to rule it all leads to 5 different cables
using the same port all supporting different set of spec and functions. Or
actually using something similar / variation of USb-C Plug but does not
actually confine to any USB spec at all, aka Nintendo Switch.

Leading to Powering and Display in the same port ( aka Thunderbolt ) which is
great in theory and idea, in practice there are much higher failure rate of
frying the CPU or display controller for all sort of reasons.

USB-C could have worked if we have much more stringent spec, and force only
two types of cable, Thin for anything below 25W, and Thick for heavy duty with
100W. Unfortunately USB4 doesn't want to be a better spec.

There are two things I hope Apple will never adopt at its current form, that
is AV1 and USB-C. And it looks like Apple is making great decisions on the two
so far.

~~~
pritambaral
What's wrong with AV1?

------
corodra
Progress before people.

While the Industrial Revolution is the accepted era as the real beginning of
progress before people, I feel the new age of technology will make the
Industrial Revolution look like an humanitarian endeavor without a PR team, in
comparison. In 2 or 3 decades, we'll look back and at the Industrial
Revolution as good old times, even with all its utter failures.

I'm sad to see that people don't see beyond modern PR. Even with the recent
Silicon Valley scandals and failures... people say they don't believe in
religion... but they traded one religion for another. They all pray and tithe
to the silicon valley titans and think that's okay.

------
jkhdigital
DNA tests exposing family secrets that normally people would take to the
grave.

~~~
greggman2
Is that a unintended consequence or an intended consequence? Seems intended to
me.

------
open-source-ux
The internet has enabled developers to track user behaviour in apps and on
websites on an industrial scale. And they've done it so successfully and
implemented it so widely that the idea of tracking user behaviour in your app
or on your website is now considered an expected and completely normal
practice.

Of course, when it's developers on the receiving end of such tracking they
will complain loudly (as they did recently about GitLab). A reflection of the
sheer hypocrisy that runs right through programming profession.

------
throwaway69173
Spotify’s advertisements in which millennials exclaim amazement at the idea of
playing music without an internet connection.

Probably accurate for some tiny portion, which is astounding no matter how
small of a group that is.

------
mattkevan
That software and tools built by idealists with the aim of increasing personal
freedom is being used to create the greatest, most comprehensive system of
surveillance and control the world has ever seen.

------
sidcool
Tech addiction. Information addiction. Addiction to HN, TechCrunch and Elon
Musk. I spend more time dreaming about tech than actually doing anything about
it..

------
buboard
\- Technical: I hate when i get a call on skype and 2 computers and a phone
start ringing in concert. And this is default behavior that cant be turned
off. I think a lot of apps do that

\- Apps that spam your contacts list and notifications that keep coming even
when you closed the app. In the name of dumbproofing everything we ve made it
hard to keep secrets secret

\- Probably not getting out of the house as much

\- An anxiety with people's public image, e.g. not being seen in any picture
breaking out of your curated public character. This is something that young
people obsess over, while previous generations wouldn't give a toss really.

\- An extension of this and porn is public nudity / the end of nudism as
culture

~~~
cellularmitosis
...and the other devices continue to ring after you’ve answered the call :(

------
haylel
When you're about to get a message on your cellphone and it interferes with
nearby speakers and makes weird chirping noises.

~~~
officeplant
Ah yes, unshielded speakers and cellphones. The terrible noise in the early
2000s letting me know my parents were calling the cellphone they gave me for
college in order to force me to keep in touch.

~~~
maest
The scenario that you describe is one of those cases where the party you
empathise with most changes as you grow older.

------
tumblerz
I do not know how to start with this. Reading through the comments, however,
is enjoyable :)

my short and random list of less important things:

a) annoyingly difficult to leave a window slightly open on an otherwise locked
vehicle (live in desert).

b) lack of control over raw data on instrumentation due to gui and locked
code. impacts science...wherein people are not field and not CS.

c) wanton disregard for self-image due to perceived shield of teh webs. vast
majority of us do not know how exposed we are.

d) total collapse of previously accepted informational authority.

e) we need societal help, but we dont know why or how.

------
bryanmgreen
Good comments from personal perspectives.

From a professional one, an absolute uncontrollable addiction to unprecedented
amounts of data.

I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, so forgive me if my analogy is a little off,
but here it goes... It's like the Force. Everyone wants it but few can handle
it. Of the few who can, the ones who use it for good are constantly fighting a
battle against those who wield it recklessly or with malice.

And with modern infrastructure, that data can captured and leveraged in
astonishingly quick ways that make it very hard to stop.

------
t34543
Lack of patience. We’re living in a instant gratification society now.

------
roarl
Maybe this is me getting old(er), but personal unintended consequences is how
little I care about new tech, especially the focus of mobile phones and how
expensive they have gotten. Not only have I reached a point where I am
actively reducing the amount of devices I have and different types of
software. This also extends to turning off any kind of notification etc, very
few things are important enough to disrupt my chain of thought at all, none
when on a regular basis.

One of my other gripes is the dumbing down of software, where everything is so
simplified that doing your own backups, or finding any kind of backups of a
kind is just incredible inconvenient or impossible.

I grew up in the 90s (born mid 80s) and I long for that era of computing in
terms of my relationship to it. While I absolutely know that I am looking at
this with heavy, rose-tinted goggles, but life without the Internet was
better. This is in the context of distraction, because the Internet has become
the distraction-enabler through mobile phones, iPads etc. While it has enabled
communication, it also enabled distraction. I'd wager that the personal
productivity and/or happiness is severely reduced for a large amount of people
and companies, due to "abusing the web".

Oh, I also never use my smartphone. I can talk with my friends for hours on
it, but other than a few things here and there, I barely use it. But what I
hate is the expectation that one should be available and accessible basically
all the time. Friends and family have gotten used to my quirks, but I still
feel the pressure of being available when the phone is close by.

------
chiefalchemist
How "personalization" and "increasing engagement" has created echo chambers
and a horrific level of confirmation bias.

------
mooreds
People talking loudly to themselves on the street (if they have airpods in).

~~~
krapp
I still sometimes have to remind myself that no, those people probably aren't
crazy.

------
capkutay
we're all going to have arthritis in our thumbs from typing on our phones so
much. I got a hand MRI for a separate injury, but my doctor noticed I had
early signs of arthritis at a relatively young age. it's a lot more common
because of heavy smart phone usage.

------
kgc
Head horns and narrower elbows:
[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190610-how-modern-
life-...](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190610-how-modern-life-is-
transforming-the-human-skeleton)

------
notelonmusk
Unnecessary consequence: assuming what is around you as the norm. Like
communication across the globe and having a social media account is as common
as toasting bread (see the irony in the last part?).

------
cweathers30
I just saw a video of a woman getting hit by a bus because she had her
headphones in and looking at her cell phone crossing a crosswalk.

Not really her fault, but I guess I would have heard a bus coming.

~~~
danieltillett
As tragic as this is, how is this not 100% her fault. Was the bus running a
red light?

~~~
greenyoda
In a crosswalk, pedestrians have the right of way. So if a driver hits someone
in crosswalk while making a turn, the driver is legally at fault. (But that
doesn't mean that it's a good idea for people to walk across a street without
paying attention.)

------
muffelsong
That orchestration technologies like k8s and OpenShift generally make services
less stable and less performant. IMO not an unexpected consequence, but
clearly an unintended one.

I guess this would not happen if people were to use the above technologies
with stateless services only, but they don't because the majority of articles,
blogs and documentation on the subject leads people to believe that using
network based storage for your io intensive state full services is good
practice.

------
odiroot
I'm out of the dating game (thank god) but I noticed dating apps completely
ruined dating in all other areas as well.

This is something both my male and female associates complain about.

------
Dowwie
I've used Google maps directions assistance for many trips but still enjoy
driving somewhere unfamiliar the old fashioned way: using written directions,
paying attention, and maintaining a sense of location. I don't remember the
feelings associated with driving the old fashioned way. Clearly, driving
assistance technology has made driving much less stressful, but also prevents
people from acquiring important navigation skills.

------
danbolt
More and more video games require an internet connection and server to be
playable. They can't be archived or revisited in the same way that an old
Nintendo ROM can be. When _World of Warcraft_ rereleased their "classic"
version, there was a lot of dialogue of what that classic experience was and
what warranted revising.

How could a computer game historian play 2009's Farmville in 2109?

------
gitgud
The rise of crypto-currency had the unintended result of getting people into
investing, rather than starting a new _currency_ people would use...

------
golemotron
The Gutenberg Press led to the Protestant Reformation.

------
karmakaze
Not so much new tech, but I was out on the deck really late in the summer and
heard a horrible sound like a dying alien. After sorting through the noise, I
finally recognized it as a mocking bird doing a very bad imitation of a car
alarm. I've heard good ones but this was just sounded sickly--perhaps it was
blending different types of alarms together.

------
mattrp
Upgrading to ios 13 and realizing they broke find my iPhone. It used to be I
would log in to find my wife’s phone the half dozen times a day she’s forget
where she put it. Now... I have to go to iCloud.com in a browser... another
irony- her credentials are stored in my passwords whereas the old find my
iPhone had no option but to forget credentials...

~~~
mikestew
I just checked to make sure: yup, I still see all of my wife’s devices in Find
My. So it’s not broken out of the box. You _did_ see the new Devices tab at
the bottom, right?

~~~
mattrp
Is she on the same iCloud login or her own?

~~~
mikestew
Her own iCloud account that is part of a Family. So yes and no? Yes, she has
her own account, but no, because she’s also under the umbrella of my account
(“Family”). But it has always been this way, yes? One must be under the Family
umbrella to see the devices of others?

~~~
mattrp
That’s the distinction - we didn’t put her account under the family plan. I
must truly be an edge case then!

~~~
mikestew
I was about to ask, “how would you find her phone if she’s not in ‘The
Family’?” And it occurs to me that you probably would enter _her_ creds into
Find My Phone, then find her phone. Yeah, that was broken from the start IMO.
Though the current model breaks your previous flow, umm, maybe use it as
intended (and the way it should have been to begin with) and just use the
Family feature?

Anyway, probably time for me to let this one go, I don’t even remember the
original issue without backtracking up thread. :-)

------
notelonmusk
Commoditization of human behavior

------
davidjnelson
Scooters, scooters everywhere :-)

------
api
Here's a positive one: smart phones with maps have helped bring about the EV
revolution.

I got an EV recently and quickly noted how annoying to near impossible finding
chargers would be without an app.

~~~
xk3
I don't really see how this works at all... people would use paper maps or
mapquest if personal GPS devices and smartphones didn't exist

(Also a full replacement of gas cars to EV will require 96% of all known
Nickel Earth deposit so it is definitely not "the solution" to the
energy/resource/transportation problem--buses are)

------
amatic
It seems most of the comments are about negative unintended consequences; but
most positive consequences also might have been unintended.

------
gao8a
A resurgence of obsolete analog things

------
ludwigvan
Productivity tools.

You end up being more productive and finishing things faster; but most of the
time, that ends up in no decrease in the time you spend on working stuff since
the system quickly adapts to your new productivity level and you still spend
all your time working.

Unless you are the one taking the majority of the surplus of your actions,
which is rarely the case in a capitalist society, it is a dreadful feeling.

The end feeling is alienation followed by depression.

------
buboard
oh and people can now work remotely. this was an early promise of the internet
that people had kind of given up on , but it came back serendipitously with
improved tech.

------
sjg007
Facebook has amplified negativity. I never thought it would be used to develop
psychological profiles and the "Russians to elect Trump".

Waze and GPS has ruined local neighborhoods and the sense of direction.

New kinds of addictions due to instant gratification.

Lack of social skills and engagement.

------
hullsean
The concept of “literacy” is relative to begin with.

------
Animats
Arbitrary censorship is OK now. Services do it. Schools do it. Governments do
it.

------
willj
Everyone is oblivious to their surroundings. Whether it’s because they’re
looking down at their smartphone or listening to a podcast or music on their
AirPods, people aren’t paying attention to what’s happening around them, and
they are walking out into streets without looking for cars, assuming no one is
coming. I bike most places, and the number of pedestrians (and other
bicyclists!) who can’t hear my bike bell is astounding.

~~~
rapnie
> I bike most places, and the number of pedestrians (and other bicyclists!)
> who can’t hear my bike bell is astounding.

I recently started to notice how many people - young and old - nowadays are
walking on the wrong side of the road, i.e. in the same lane with other
traffic in the same direction.

As a kid I always learned you should be in the opposite lane, so you can
monitor oncoming traffic coming towards you, jump out of the way if needed. A
safety measure (4 watchful eyes instead of 2).

I guess more than half of people no longer do that, and I wondered if that was
also an effect of our self-centered, smartphone society: 'I can't be bothered
to take note of you, but I expect you to take notice of me'.

~~~
gcarvalho
At least where I live (not US), the law states that bikes should not go
against the traffic.

Accidents are more dangerous in frontal collisions and the reaction window is
shorter.

I bike daily and I've been surprised a few times by other bikers coming
against the traffic, especially in turns.

edit: I think I misread you. You're talking about pedestrians. Oops.

