
Why Nothing Works Anymore – Technology No Longer Serves Human Ends - Osiris30
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-singularity-in-the-toilet-stall/517551/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=iosapp&amp;single_page=true
======
stinkytaco
This reads a bit like Neal Postman in _Technopoly_ , but I think misses, like
Postman, a few critical points. Most of them can be reduced to "technology
does not exist in a social or cultural vacuum".

For example, what dos this even mean:

> _Once decoupled from their economic motivations, devices like automatic-
> flush toilets acclimate their users to apparatuses that don’t serve users
> well in order that they might serve other actors, among them corporations
> and the sphere of technology itself. In so doing, they make that uncertainty
> feel normal._

How can you possibly decouple these from their economic motivations. That is
precisely the reason these technologies exist. They may not serve their ends
well, but they don't perpetuate themselves. Someone feels they are saving
money. (As an aside, automatic towel dispensers have certainly reduced the
amount of towel waste in our public bathrooms and I think the automatic faucet
is much more hygienic and stops people from leaving it running.)

Or

> _Go to Amazon.com and search for an ordinary product like a pair of shoes or
> a toaster. Amazon wants to show its users as many options as possible, so it
> displays anything it can fulfill directly or whose fulfillment it can
> facilitate via one of many catalog partnerships. In some cases, one size or
> color of a particular shoe might be available direct from Amazon, shipped
> free or fast or via its Prime two-day delivery service, while another size
> or color might come from a third party, shipped later or at increased cost.
> There is no easy way to discern what’s truly in stock._

I can admit to having been confused by Amazon's options before, but frankly
the ability to get things I cannot get at my local big box and for less is
almost always worth the occasional confusion. The time I spend reading and
sorting is time I would otherwise spend waiting in traffic or looking for a
parking spot.

Just like the ability to find information quickly without reading through many
web pages or going to the library every time I want an answer generally
justifies a Google search for me. I haven't internalized these things. I have
made a rational comparison and found one to be superior.

~~~
bdavisx
>I cannot get at my local big box and for less is almost always worth the
occasional confusion

I've been finding a lot of things seem to cost more at Amazon lately -
although I'm not generally looking at things that are very expensive - like
<$50, so I'm probably seeing that "free shipping with prime" being added back
in.

------
Karunamon
The whole gist of this ode to ludditism appears to be the buried quote: _The
more technology multiplies, the more it amplifies instability._

Not only is this an unsupported assertion, the author cites a number of minor,
solvable annoyances as intractable problems.

 _Are the toilets flushing too often? Revise the sensor hardware. Is online
news full of falsehoods? Add machine-learning AI to separate the wheat from
the chaff. Are retail product catalogs overwhelming and confusing? Add content
filtering to show only the most relevant or applicable results._

Sounds fine to me. The problem has been identified, and the solution is within
our grasp. Let's work toward it instead of jettisoning the baby with the
bathwater.

These annoyances come out because new technology often arrives half-baked.
It's nice having the future here _now_ , but that often means it doesn't work
exactly right out of the gate. That's fine, because more often than not, the
benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

For the most part, our society can deal with an extra toilet flush every now
and then.

------
bobbytherobot
This article was already posted and discussed on Hacker News:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13716724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13716724)

------
camillomiller
Even the article isn't working because I have an adblocker installed. A
hindrance that certainly won't serve a potential reader's ends.

------
exolymph
I'll repeat what I said on Twitter: "A weird metaphor used to elide the
reality that all of these problems stem from human choices."

------
Nomentatus
First, thanks to Woody Allen for making the point that in the future _fewer_
things will work well, not more; in the movie Sleeper. (I laughed, but I
didn't believe him way back then, when it came out. I do now!)

The author is wrong about why. Now, we all get to deal constantly with infant
technology, very early in it's technological cycle, low on the learning curve.
Soon this tech too will be displaced by a new, new thing - before most of the
wrinkles have been ironed out, before it becomes mature tech. Infant tech has
always been ugly to deal with us, from the time of the Newcomen engine, to the
first gas engines... there just hasn't been so much of it before. Now the
changes come so quickly that almost no technology becomes polished and well-
adapted to humans before at least some significant part of it is replaced by a
new infant tech with its own teething problems.

There is economic benefit, but the costs of forcing humans to begin another
learning curve are likely underestimated, along with other unintended
consequences.

There is also the Genghis John effect; if too many things are changing at once
the usual checks and balances can't possibly keep up.

But there were also a lot of technological inconveniences in the past that I
wouldn't wish to experience again, thank you very much. Cameras that easily
exposed film accidentally, TVs that would self-destruct when you tried to use
the earphone plug to record from them, toasters that violently exploded the
wall sockets they were plugged into because the paper tape insulation on wires
had unwound over the years shorting them out internally, highly flammable
children's pajamas, lead in paint and gasoline; and much, much more.

The big difference is that in the past there was an "age bonus." Yes the tech
was terrible and dangerous but by a certain age you knew where and what all
the problems were and were nearly at the top of almost every learning curve
that mattered to you. You got to relax, and teach the youngsters. That bonus
has been ripped away, of course; and we of a certain age do get cranky about
it. I've given up on truly fixing my Android device, configuring Windows yet
one more time, and many more things because unlike Sisyphus, I do get bored
with the whole rolling the rock back up the hill thing. Nonetheless, I like
what I can get to work, so I'm okay Jack.

------
dakrootie
Nothing. Works. Anymore.

Here I was thinking the world gets more awesome every day. I am now awake.

------
anotherarray
Why is humanity the "subject" of History and technology simply the "object"?

Why do we always think like this?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Because the point of having a machine is never just to have the machine. It's
to make us able to do things we couldn't before, or to do them more
efficiently and effectively.

Technology doesn't create itself. _We_ create it, and we create it for a
reason - a reason that matters to _us_ , not to the technology.

~~~
ominous
"Technology doesn't create itself." well, we might end up telling the story of
how Amazon internal microservice culture created AWS, or the war created GPS.
In that sense, on some level, technology (or ideas or culture) does beget
other things. Over time, as each individual human becomes less significant, we
might end up being just part of the medium that helps ideas manifest other
ideas.

