
Ask HN: The biggest technology that people think is working, but it doesn't? - hkai
What&#x27;s the biggest piece of technology that everyone thinks or pretends is working fine, but it actually doesn&#x27;t?
======
muzani
Currency and debt.

Currency is a lot like electricity. It's a very portable form of power, easy
to store, easy to convert to something else.

Like you can have a lot of political power, you can have charisma, skills, or
military power. But you can't convert that easily into the other, the way you
can't convert a river into lighting your house.

But the thing with electricity is that it still follows nature. You can't
convert 1 MW of electricity into kinetic power, then convert it back to 1.1
MW. You can't lend it to someone with less, expect them to give you more, and
have this system run forever. You can't just print as much of it as you think
you can get away with.

Banking is a kind of arms race. If nobody used banks and usurious debt,
everyone would be better off. But the people who do it have an unfair
advantage, forcing others to as well. Except now we're pushing it as far as
the concept can go, with every country taking well near their GDP in foreign
debt.

The Bitcoin boom didn't come out of nothing. Some people lost faith in fiat
and wanted to give alternative currency a shot. The bubble only happened when
crypto attracted the attention of those who broke fiat in the first place.

~~~
sunstone
The money/electricity metaphor has one very fatal flaw. Electricity, as a
natural entity, must conform with all the conservation laws of nature. Not so
for money.

The key attribute of money is that it's _much_ more efficient than the next
best alternative, which is trading my pigs for your shovels and that's why it
continues to work even in extreme (eg hyperinflation) contexts.

~~~
muzani
I'd disagree with the last bit - the next best alternative could be Bitcoin,
ETH, gold, Euro, e-wallet money, stocks, bonds, or even debt. You can trade
dollars for an imaginary dollar-backed value in PayPal's database. You can use
something like HelloGold if you prefer something gold-backed instead.

You're probably right - that could be money's key attribute. So what happens
when someone else does it better?

~~~
x220
That's still money, it's just different currencies. Money (or currency) is
something that is widely accepted to have value not from its inherent
properties but because it is accepted everywhere in a transaction. If
something is difficult to exchange quickly with most exchange partners (e.g.
taking days to transfer stocks from you to a gas station) then it's either not
a currency or its a bad currency. Bitcoin and other cryptocoins are "sort-of-
currencies" because you can't practically use bitcoin and stop using USD. This
is why the SEC is starting to treat crypto like a security.

------
sunstone
The biggest piece of technology that seems fine but isn't is automobiles. They
are much too big and ponderous for the 90% of the time they are moving one
person around a big city at 30mph. Electrification will produce much smaller,
lighter, cheaper, safer vehicles for this purpose.

------
LarryMade2
Advertising data algorithms. Usually they are just promoting things you
already have recently purchased.

------
buboard
Advertising. There is not much published about how actual money people get on
their investment in the major platforms, including online. It's not tech that
"doesnt work", but it "doesnt work half the time". But since a lot of online
advertising is fueled by the wave of high valuations , people seem to be fine
with not knowing whether it works or not.

------
ScottFree
Science. I can't take any study seriously until it's been replicated at least
once, preferably twice. Does anybody know if there's a search engine for
replicated studies?

------
james_impliu
"machine learning" in large corporates, when in practice this is 90%+ just
maths/algorithms

------
gradschool
facial recognition, especially when used by UK police against certain
minorities

ML models making decisions about who gets to receive benefits (according to a
bunch of articles in today's Guardian)

------
throwaway981211
Recommendation systems.

