Am I alone in thinking that we're bouncing back from a highly technological future?
I have this notion that we're entering a new fuzzy era of rejecting the hyper technological stream that we've been on since the 90's. I notice people now wanting to use their phones for longer (e.g. not replacing them every 2 years because it's the trend) and I feel there's a push back towards certain things like touchscreens in cars being reverted back to clicky buttons.
Sure, there are these crazy developments happening in science. A.I. is changing so fast it's hard to keep up with, and we're going back to the moon! (I say we because it's a human endeavor goddamn it).
But there also seems to be this realization that we might have strained Earth a little too much and that we need to tend to Earth, and ourselves a little bit more.
For reference, I'm a millennial born in '89.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Rather than bouncing back, I feel like humanity is more looking inward. "Is this really what I want?" "Do I already have enough?" etc.
This makes sense when you think about our needs and wants. For a long time, humans were primarily concerned with survival. People tended not to care much about governance(oversimplification I know, I'm really talking about the long arcs here), and were content with simply being able to live.
Later on, we began wanting more physical safety. Standards of living. As survival slowly became the norm, physical safety became more important. Working standards, the ability to have healthcare, etc. Also, we began to think of children as something to protect rather than mini-adults. To an extend, this is a part of the reason environmentalism became a thing. It's easy to forget just how bad the environment was in the 60s, 70s etc. Rivers full of industrial waste. Smog in cities, and more.
Now we're also seeing another trend. Caring for our mental well being. Having a quality of life. Not just soaking up in material needs, but more. And one thing that's stressful is the amount of change that's happening right now. It's not all necessarily fear-inducing, but definitely anxiety-inducing if you ask me.
This is of course, very oversimplified. Your points are more aligned with taking care of the natural system we rely on, but I also see a trend of people asking when something is enough, and taking care of themselves mentally.
Basically at its core, I think there are multiple trends going on:
How this will end up? I have no idea. This all doesn't have to be good, bad, or unexpected. It's a rather complicated time with some issues that may well end up being unique in all of human history.
This is the crux of it here I think. The last 1-200 years has seen our ability to innovate and communicate grow by amazing lengths while, evolutionarily, our brain is still in tribal mode, built for a time when innovations happened maybe on the scale of centuries, and all the other people across the world had little-no influence over you.
Trouble ripens ever faster.
I'm not going to lie and say I didn't thought out the title well enough ;) There is some potential in clickbait and damn do I hate it! But darn is it effective.
The majority of people are not tech people, their usage and adoption of technology are purely need based. They will adopt something if they see a need to, not because they want to. Smart phones improvements have been rather minimal over the last 3 to 4 years, they are functionally complete until the next killer feature is developed. Why spend a lot of money on a new phone unless their is a need to? They aren't really fashion items, at least not anymore, and setting up a new phone is a pain.
As for cars, people have a expectations about the UX of operating a car, glass cars are not easy to use. The ergonomics aren't there and if I'm spending 10s of thousands on a new vehicle, I want it to be easy or fun to use. The novelty wears off fast. Since most people aren't tech people and just want the thing to be easy use they are pushing back with their wallets.
Try 10 years. The Galaxy S5 debuted 10 years ago. It has almost every major feature today's phones have, plus:
Sure, there's been incremental improvement on most of the things since then. But the only reason it can't be a daily driver anymore is software bloat and bad manufacturer support.
I would be very curious to see what the S5 battery life would be if we did a die shrink on the 28nm process and added 2GB of RAM.
If we froze the tech at that point, the usage of phones would still be more or less identical.
At this point, a smartphone has almost reached the level of a general appliance like an oven, a refrigerator, a washing machine or dishwasher. Products that haven't changed dramatically for a long time and are mostly updated with energy efficiency improvements. But of course, that is not a prospect the smartphone makers want to deal with because it would mean less sold units per year.
I'm convinced part of our green future involves nationalizing 'solved' commodities and building only the best version, scaling up manufacturing as much as possible, and distributing at-cost.
Some other examples:
You will have to pry my Shark DuoClean out of my cold, dead, hands! :P It's the only vacuum I have ever owned that handles pet hair on carpet, hardwood, and furniture equally effectively.
And therein lies the rub. IMO, the major problem with your idea of a homogeneous market is that none of those products are actually "solved". Different people often have wildly different needs, and different makes and models of products exist to address them. A single make/model of any product, be it a vacuum, vehicle, smartphone, or even toilet paper, is never going to be able to cover every use case.
I'll accept that for nationalizing the stick vaccum. I'll grant they are especially useful in tight spaces.
This is ours. It's been going strong 8 years, with 0 maintenance short of removing stuck hairs from the carpet brush and replacing filters. We probably should do at least some of the reccomended maintenance. Only 2 bits have broken: accidentally warped the hose a bit by leaving it against a baseboard heater for 24 hours, and the carpet head is a bit jacked from an incompetent guest brute-forcing it instead of clicking the pedal.
Worth every penny.
I would be for that, except we don't have to disallow people from making anything. Have the government version be the basic go to that is affordable because it's made at scale. If a private version can compete, that's fine. That's how innovation can still happen. After a few years patents should expire and the government version can use those innovations if they are a benefit to society.
Are you talking about the government getting into manufacturing or some kind of general model available to all?
Yes. In my examples:
Government siezes control of Charmin factories. Eliminates all arbitrary market segmentation, distributes product at-cost. This would be the general model for all 'solved' commodities. Any private manufacturer would need to do better than the government baseline. For many things, they probably wouldn't bother, and all that effort expended on marketing arbitrary market segmentation can be spent elsewhere.
Government siezes a few car factories, and bans everyone else from producing vehicles that have only combustion engines. They sell these with specific production targets that go down every year to phase out the technology.
This would seriously disincentivize me from bothering to create …. anything at all. Frankly one of the more disturbing and dystopian ideas I’ve seen seriously proposed.
The outcome of this perverse incentive scheme would be bizarre to witness, as companies struggle to make their products marginally worse to avoid being stolen by the government.
Opposed to our current situation where companies make their products marginally worse YoY in order to prevent destroying their customer base and improve their margins in perpetuity. Look at what happened to Instapot for a fairly recent example.
And never said the government takeover couldn't involve some degree of a buyout and/or royalty payment. Eminent domain isn't free, generally.
Edit: Removed some needless snark. Sorry about that.
I don't see how converting to a Soviet style command economy isn't going to destroy innovation, and the idea of a "solved commodity" doesn't exist as far as I'm concerned -- every product's innovation is only bounded by people's imagination and the surrounding technological ecosystem. Even something as "simple" as the production of toilet paper or vacuum cleaners can and will be improved over time so long as economic pressures continue to act on it, but the second the government comes in and starts dumping products at cost into the market those forces will dry up.
Keep in mind, the Soviet-style economy was beating the USA in the space race. It industrialized at a breakneck pace, which was probably the only reason they didn't get ROFLstomped during WWII and Hitler not having to face pressure from both sides.
This isn't to say that it wasn't a political nightmare, especially given its formation, but to say that it was a failure of innovation is a bit disingenuous.
I'd say a proper democratically-transitioned soviet economy would fare much better, especially given the astronomical advances in computing since 1980something.
Not really. Kitchen knives haven't really had revolutionary improvements in hundreds of years, and they're still pretty much the top-of-class tool for anybody with no disabilities and a bit of practice. Hammers have actively regressed in recent years....I've got 3 hammers from the 1940's that are 10x better than anything available at the home improvement stores. Sure, there's incremental improvements periodically...but that's nothing a few academic competitions wouldn't replace.
Also, eventually the laws of physics outstrip any human attempts to innovate. We're already rapidly approaching those practical limits of diminishing returns WRT electronics and heat pumps. You'll notice that most TVs and monitors look like crap at the default 'home' setting...that's because its the only way to get Energy Star ratings...as soon as you color match them properly they're still using more-or-less the same energy that they have for several years.
Dyson air purifiers are pretty neat looking, but they're also pretty shit at their primary purpose of removing particles from the air. Turns out the HEPA filter is still top-notch at that, and that design hasn't fundamentally changed since the 1950's.
Do we need cellphones to be faster every year? Or do we just need to insure everyone on the planet has one, even if it means 'freezing' the technology to ramp production up and insure spare parts are everywhere?
The constant churn of technology is killing the planet.
And does it? Because what I've seen over the course of my 40 years is that for every massive innovation, there's about 1,00,000 regressions as quality is sacrificed and factories are moved to slave-wage countries to get the lowest price, creating massive amounts of garbage and masking the true cost of luxury goods.
Keep in mind, they lost the space race, and that was while simultaneously totally sacrificing consumer goods and living conditions for the entire population. It was in fact a gross failure of innovation taken across the economy as a whole, with the sole exception of being kind of okay at rocketry briefly. And America flipped the switch in 1961 and blew the Soviets out of the water in 8 years, while making zero sacrifices at the consumer level.
That wouldn't be my go-to example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_knife
I don't know what to say -- electronic technology is improving at such an incredible rate it's hard to compare to any other point in human history.
I'm not sure what that says about the state of technology. From my perspective, there are consumer grade 3d TVs available, and 8k resolutions that can reliably stream full definition content over my home internet connection. TVs of 10 years ago are complete garbage compared to TVs of today.
I don't know enough about filters to comment on this, but my somewhat unfounded suspicion is that the manufacturing process and effectiveness for the HEPA filter built in 1950 is not very similar to the modern one.
I would say yes, I do want more from my phone. And here we're explicitly planning on killing innovation, which is abhorrent to me.
Honestly, it sounds like we live on separate planets. When I look around, I see constant improvements in nearly every way, and I do not feel any desire to live in a rebooted Soviet Union or China. We've seen what that looks like -- it's not good, and I don't believe for a second that it's just because it wasn't "real communism" or something. It's just a bad system that disregards actual human nature.
I won't bother digging in my heels on the space race, there's a lot of confounding factors at play and a lot more nuance to be explored that will ultimately lead us nowhere. I still hold that the Soviet system wouldn't have been so brutally bad if not birthed from nigh-perpetual war.
I'll double down on the steel knife however. I've used ceramic blades, and as it says on the wikipedia page:
Whoopty do, we managed to avoid a 10-minute sharpening every few months and in exchange got a much less functional tool that will chip and shatter when you inevitably drop it. My steel knife doubles as a garlic press, just lay it flat and then slam on it. If it does break, the steel can be completey recovered and reused....can we say the same about fancy ceramic composites?
And that's kind of what I'm getting at....how much of our 'innovation' is truely lifechanging improvements, and how much is just another step on the hedonistic treadmill? How much is genuine improvement you needed in your life and not something that marketting pitches and hype convinced you you needed?
The last step in TV fidelity that mattered was the move from SDTV to 1080p over 20 years ago. Watch 10 random movies in 1080p and then again 4 months later in 4k or 8k. Did your enjoyment of the content double because of more pixels? It was this revalation that had me drop the 4k Netflix and only bothering downloading 720p rips anymore. It's almost as if the display technology doesn't really matter much once you get past a minimum threshold of quality.
What does your 2024 phone do today that was not physically possible on a phone from 10 years ago which is not just a hedonistic treadmill of 'MOAR PIXELS'. An example of what I mean: A fingerprint sensor built into a screen instead of on a button is a hedonistic improvement. As is using a scan of your face instead of a fingerprint. At the end of the day, neither of those saves you more than a few seconds, even over using the tried and true password. I'm looking for big things like "Can now be used for mobile payments" or "Can charge another device wirelessly." That last one is actually a neat trick my S21 can do that the S5 can't....but I've never found myself in a situation where that was a genuinely useful feature and not just a party trick.
At the end of the day, is all of the effort (read carbon emissions) worth having to overhaul manufacturing processes every few years and create mountains of waste as we try to convince people that what they already have isn't good enough?
Is there a single game for the PS5 that wouldn't have been possible to make for the PS4, but with a tiny bit less graphical fidelity?
The government has never manufactured things. I don't think this would go as you envision. You'd have politicians lowering quality to get votes.
The Springfield Armory, inventor of the M14, manufactured firearms for almost 200 years. Be careful with absolutes.
If you can manufacture a gun, you can manufacture pretty much anything. They require very tight tolerances.
That's fair, the big thing is really encouraging the government (and building voter support) to go 'yoink' to create that high-quality baseline when needed.
Added bonus that government operations (outside of the military) tend to come with a lot more transparency.
Edit: Also, I called out ICE cars for banning private production since that's a commodity we're looking to phase out, not continue to refine.
Toilet paper aside, these don't even need to be distributed to individuals. They could easily be shared by communities, drastically reducing the number that need to be produced. Why should both of us have a set of screwdrivers, of which we each use a handful of times a year, when we could share it?
They wouldn't need to produce so many right now if not for planned obsolescence. I'd rather companies start looking at how long a product lasts as a matter of brand pride.
Used to be, for decades. Craftsman used to have literal 'lifetime unlimited warranty' for their tools, but that has gone away as the quality plummeted. Used to be able to dig an old rusty Craftsman tool out of a rummage sale and trade it in for a brand-new one.
In my proposed universe, government would be producing 1980something quality Craftsman screwdrivers/wrenches/hammers/etc. They could probably scale back production to 1/10th current levels once everyone replaced their garbage.
I think both strategies should be implemented. I don't have strong feelings on which should come first, but both would be better for individual users, communities, and the planet.
Both would require companies to sacrifice quite a bit of profit, although I think the community use model would additionally require a drastic (imo positive) shift in how neighborhoods and communities interact, and some small infrastructure changes to allow for storage that is easily accessible to all without encroaching heavily on any individuals space and privacy. A small shed or two centrally located in each neighborhood would do it, or a few units for storage in an apartment building, would work just fine. So while both are extremely unlikely and would require massive changes in the way corporations and our economy functions, the community use model requires a few extra small and easy steps and is therefore slightly more difficult.
McCarthy would like a weird with you, sir! /s
I finally figured out that an ICE vehicle is "internal commission engine". I had been wondering how snowmobiles came into the discussion.
ICE = Internal combustion engine. ;)
Autocorrect is not always helpful.
I'm gonna counter your TP with butt guns.
Way less TP needed, and a cleaner brown eye. You can even use paper towels in a pinch as the paper is mostly just for drying off, not scraping the last layers of flesh off your hemorrhoids.
Oh I'm 100% behind bidets. Turns out taking a mini shower is much preferable. Although I have that New Jersey water pressure and sometimes it feels like its shredding my butthole at 1500psi....I should probably install a pressure regulating valve on my main.
Hence why charmin ultrastong....absorbant enough for 1 tiny square to do the job of cleaning up a horrific mess. 1 mega roll + bidet lasts my family of 4 almost a month.
Haha, yeah never aim directly at the exhaust pipe, and apologies for assuming you weren't an enlightened bum gun using human.
Yeah, I was being conservative in my 3-4 years. I'm still using a Pixel 4, which i though was about 4 years old and I only upgraded since my previous phone was a windows phone which was simply no longer supported.
Still actively using a Pixel 3 XL on wifi as a kid's 3-hour-car-ride gaming device. It's still a great phone.
Im still using a Pixel 3a, It works good enough for me.
Yes. Folks were in love with technology until about circa ~2010-12 A.D. when Moore's Law was very much operational.
I remember buying my first 1GB pen drive for ₹1200 which was quite a big price in India in those days. As hardware started becoming cheaper and better, and there was also a lot happening in the free and open source world like Linux, PHP, Wordpress, Drupal, Android, etc., the pulse of technology felt very much alive and people friendly. Laptops and Androids started becoming cheaper and better, people were enthusiastic to play around with compilers and programming editors and even experiment with WiFi and Bluetooth, rooting and custom ROMs.
But then this toxic post Moore's Law era began and what we call "Big Tech" today started consolidating and taking control of technology everywhere. They ensured that innovation stopped entirely in the hardware world, except for small pieces of "upgrades" which was essentially nothing but Planned Obsolescence. This is the era when folks started disliking technology, it started becoming more of a Capitalist thing instead of something that neo-luddites themselves could tinker and play around with. I call this the beginning of "Dark Ages in Technological Innovation" and unless there is some cataclysmic shift in the way things work, we are in for a very rough ride in the coming future.
Might this be a bubble effect, where you involuntarily moved out of that part the tech bubble?
Because there's still a lot happening in open source, it is objectively much more people friendly.
Androids and Laptops are dirt cheap (if you take one that's just good enough), and if you're into custom ROMs, LinageOS and GrapheneOS are better than ever before. God, do I not miss flashing different binary blobs just to get my camera working or to get the phone to use the correct microphone...
And if you're experimenting with WiFi and Bluetooth today, you're not messing around with the very limited options provided by end-user chipsets. No, you're getting a dirt cheap open hardware software defined radio, and minutes after taking it out of the box, you're handcrafting IQ-parameters at 5 GHz and using an entire phased array of antennas to look for a directional response. You can literally reverse engineer GPS in software from scratch or track aircraft using phase sensitive passive radar.
And no matter what you do, all that comes with open source python libraries as a matter of course.
The community messing around with large language models on their own hardware is huge. They make amazing software very close to the amazing hardware Apple (unified memory on Apple Silicon is huge) and NVIDIA have been selling.
As technology has gotten smaller, it has become more ubiquitous, more hidden.
I firmly believe we are living in the most rapidly advancing technological revolution that we have ever had, right now, the only difference is that technology has finally reached a point where it's becoming so smoothly operated without maintenance, and can be ran almost entirely hidden. Ambient, or invisible, technology will only get more advance and powerful, and will continue to blend more and more seamlessly into our lives.
This is all across the world, smartphones are second nature, and last longer. AR/VR is starting to finally have its moment after 40 years of serious attempts, bionics and prosthetics are beginning to finally be as useful as, or more than, their organic counterparts. Virtual assistants are rather ubiquitous, and are better, but more minimal in capabilities than they were in the last, and home automation and security are so intertwined and everywhere that we don't even assume it's not there somewhere these days. Servers don't tend to fail as much as they used to, even for small home clusters, and computers and smartphones rarely ever fail, blue screen, or brick themselves. Nearly everyone is a gamer, and everyone has a high end console, or has heard of one, has played on one, or watched a video of a game being played on one. Kitchen appliances are getting pretty intelligent with better cooling, more accurate heating, and longer lasting as well. We can even reasonably expect the chips and electronics in any cheap tool or toy to last longer than the casing surrounding it, that's never been the case before the last few very years.
We're just living in a new era of ubiquitous and ambient technology, it's pretty cool.
It is a little too smooth at this point, isn’t it?
Someone commenting on a different post a few days ago referenced quod libret which gave me flashbacks to the mid to late 2000s: ALSA and PulseAudio couldn’t just be friends, mpd conf always got fat fingered, IceCast was a thing. Diving head first into the wonderland of openbox’s XML config files.
But kids these days just drop a yaml file, change some paths, and
docker compose up -d.I've just recently discovered the joy of
mpd, and I'm not going back. Pair it withbeetfor library management, and life is so much easier.mpdis beautiful, isn’t it? For a long time I had a cron job to play an album and fade the volume up over 10 minutes or so. Resultantly, the second track of Soon It Will Be Cold Enough will be burned into my mind for the rest of my days.Did you add mpd status info - and optionally cover art - to your
conky?I don't use status monitors...mostly a waste of screen space unless something is really churning IMO.
I use 'Yakuake' for a quick terminal dropdown for that kind of stuff.
Here's my only tiny clever bit so far, so I don't need to lug all my music on the laptop. Simple and elegant.
Yakuake is practically a requirement for any setup, Tilda is similar, Guake (The OG drop down terminal) is good for Gnome systems.
I think it might help to clarify the question:
Is this about predicting the future or understanding the present?
When you say "we," do you mean worldwide, people in rich countries, people in the US, or maybe some more specific group?
It sounds like you're thinking mostly about consumer behavior? Or are you also interested in how people are using technology at work?
both present and future
we as humanity, but yea I mostly keep in touch with friends close-by. I don't know how your aunt Laura is doing in New Zealand for example :P
People at home, their surroundings, not work related per se.
For an example of how much things could change worldwide, here's a report from 2018 saying that most households in hot countries haven't purchased their first air conditioner [1].
In that respect, a lot of technological change is still to come, using what's old technology for us.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-cooling
Even as someone who has worked in tech fields for a long time at this point, I have fallen out of love with most of technology at this point- at least as far as the majority of both tangible and digital technological products and services go. So much so that I don't feel compelled to continue working in the field at all, unless I find particular angles to work within that I feel contribute to a better society (repair, helping people use tech in good ways and for good things, etc).
Feeling constantly burned and disappointed by enshittified companies with products that follow. Feels like so many things that once started by doing a helpful thing now are just overwhelmed by shittiness the longer they exist. Most of the technology I use, I now do so begrudgingly. Social media, YT/Twitch, and so on. I prefer to own my music rather than stream it, etc.
I try to make the best of technology and use it in ways that provides benefits to me, but I consistently find myself falling into bad uses of it, being distracted by it, allowing social media and other things to steal my time away when they shouldn't, and so on. I've at least so far de-Googled my life, run Linux as my daily OS (not that I recommend this for everyone), and so on. Now my focus is when I use tech it's pure escapism (games, video content) or creation (music production), or any number of personal and home projects. When it comes to social media, I've strongly curated my feeds and groups to try to only focus on things with a particular bent that I find useful to me (whether family, humor, good community, leftism, music, etc) and rid it of nearly everything else.
With the incoming era of AI, which I have no interest in, it simply feels like many of the dumpster fires of technology we've long been inundated have now had gallons of AI accelerant poured on them. Our 'smart' device bullshit will now be even worse and more ubiquitous. Our search engines will have awful results and move away from their simple, useful origins. Our own human pursuits of expression and skill will be disgustingly imitated by hollow simulacrums. AI bands already exist. Plenty of shitty bands already use AI for album covers and probably lyrics too, distorting that which should have retained its pure human form (it's no surprise nearly every music act that involves AI in some way REALLY sucks). Our productivity will yet again be expected to increase exponentially (without our pay following). Misinformation, inequality, and employment problems will only be exacerbated by its existence.
Don't get me wrong. I've seen ways AI tools can be useful when they're limited to being things like conversion tools and whatnot, or small parts of a much larger system, or built in ways that aren't generative. Many of my problems with AI and technology honestly mostly come from how they develop in societies such as ours. The systems themselves aren't necessarily inherently bad at all, it's the greedy, oppressive, coercive systems of economic and social power and the corruption that imposes on how they're built, used, funded, and unleashed upon humanity
Some days I truly do dream of dropping a lot of technology use completely and going back to more basic things. Thoughts/dreams of going semi off-grid at some point, or finding ways to live life that don't necessitate much tech use outside of very specific use cases, or something. Finding a better balance than I've lived with for so long.
So much effort has been expended re-implementing the same technologies in infinitesimally different ways that have been in use since before 1990 something.
SSH + X forwarding comes to mind. As well as LDAP + Kerberos + PAM.
Even most of the modern chat programs could be transparently replaced with a well-managed IRC server + web client.
I think what's happening is arguably the usual story with humanity: something Really Cool and Awesome is created, people dream of all the neat things that they can do with it.... and then the reality of how it's ACTUALLY used comes crashing down.
We DO have all these awesome technological advancements. The problem is, they're still just ultimately tools in the end. And it's become my (rather cynical) opinion that humanity prefers to abuse the tools we make to have power over others, rather than use them to benefit other people. Especially with the Internet, we keep hearing about all these companies getting our personal data and then selling it for profit. If that is what advanced technology is going to be used for... people prefer their privacy rather than new gadgets.
IMO, the exact opposite is true. Only a very very very very small minority of people (mostly terminally online techies, of which I am one, to be clear) actually care about privacy. The vast majority of people don't really care about it. And so long as giving their personal information away to corporations doesn't noticeably negatively affect them, they will happily trade it for convenience. If that weren't true, nobody would use Google/Gmail, Facebook, Amazon, etc. And yet they still do, in huge numbers.
I'm glad I made big strides in getting rid of most of it. But it's a persistent battle.
It's just a shitty predicament that big companies have the incentive to squeeze out every penny they can make to outdo their competition (if we don't do it, someone else will, shrug). Google sitting on a pile of email data and NOT using that is just unthinkable now. I very much would like privacy to be the norm, ads not being personalized and data mining opt-in but, those are pipedreams these days.
I think it seems that way partially because personal wealth isn't growing in pace with technological development anymore. Even a decline in confidence in your financial future is going to make you rethink that iPhone purchase: what if a rainy day is coming? I'm trying to buy my first house in the middle of a housing crisis, Im not interested in a marginally better way to scroll Instagram while on the go.
Eh, maybe in some ways, but I think that's mainly because the technologies you've described specifically are no longer new, and thus people's infatuation with them has wained.
You saw the same thing in the 50s and 60s with space travel being an obsession in everyone's mind, and products being heavily marketed as "space age" and associated with the space program, all of which seems dated and obsolete now.
Anecdotally, it feels like we're escaping a lul in technological innovation over the last 5-10 years.
Most of my early life in the 90s and early 2000s, technology didn't seem like it had advanced much. Computers got faster and smaller, cars got a little better, but day to day it didn't really feel like the average lifestyle of someone from 1980 was that different from someone from 2000.
That feels like it's changed so dramatically in the past 10 years, but especially the past 5.
Everyone being on the Internet via smartphones is so different than even 10 years ago, when they were expensive and niche.
Private spaceflight being a routine thing that happens is crazy. Large language models are hyped to hell, but are the one tech trend of recent memory that may actually live up to the hype and change the world.
Satellites are broadcasting low cost, high speed internet everywhere in the world, and gene editing technology is not only viable, but kind of affordable.
I think all of this is going to fundamentally change society so rapidly, and so much more dramatically than anything anyone is used to that I can honestly say I have no clue what society will look like in another decade.
For me it's less a feeling of having "strained Earth a little too much", but rather that pretty much every new release of products is a downgrade in quality with an increase in cash-grabbing. I hate this trend so much, as do many people. At least that's my impression.
What goes hand in hand with this trend is my urge to reject new technology. I have seen how bad Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, and all the other social media platforms have been for society, and it seems to be getting worse by the day, with no bottom in sight. It's tiring. It's a waste of time.
So I'm short: I've observed pretty much the same trend you are describing, but for different reasons. (Albeit pretty similar ones)
oh I agree with you on your examples too. But I notice it with movies and videogames too. The rereleases of older material and ask top dollar for it seems absurd. It's like creativity is dead and making money has become the new king.
I am not saying technology has peaked, but there is definitely many things that have diminishing returns by now. We adopted technology because it made our lives easier or more fun, not just because the "tech was cool". Most cheap 2K/4K TVs are good enough for the wast majority of people. So are the general smartphone and its camera. Cars work basically the same way, and the overuse of touchscreens in some cases make them more annoying or dangerous to work with. In addition, many of the online services we use have started the well known enshittification process where they get both worse and more expensive to use, forcing end users to think harder about their priorities. For example Facebook and other social media started of as helping us stay in touch with friends and family, but is now so ridden with spam and ragebait that it is not time spent that makes you happy anymore. It is a good thing we are started being more critical of every advancement in technology, that it should actually improve our lives and not just be cool for its own sake.
I see technology popularity as a pendulum.
The future was seen as very chill and trendy in the 50's and early 60's. That's why we have retro futuristic as a look you can easily recognize, basically The Jetsons and Epcot Center vibe. So many cool gadgets - that mom would use to do the housework.
Later in the 60's we swung back hard the other way. Now we had hippies living in communes that were basically camping all the time. I didn't live through this era so I'm not completely clear what happened to everyone else, but I get the general impression there was a pushback on change in general.
In the 80's the future was cool again. Kids rode the school bus with walkmans and boom boxes. Atari and Commodore 64 were available to anyone who could afford them or knew someone who could. Hypercolor T-shirts were everywhere.
I didn't see a strong swing back between then and the 2020's. It feels to me like this had been building up and people have been getting burned out on whatever the latest things is, I'd love to see someone point out what I missed. You hear about people quitting tech to become farmers and woodworkers going back to the 90's, but I think that was more of a mental health reaction by individual people than a tend.
We had a home cooking movement in 2020, a lot of people also started gardening. The general public is both terrified and fascinated by AI. They don't know if we're looking at The Terminator or Star Trek.
This is a very US centric view and I'm completely ignoring causes. There are always insane things happening somewhere that are going to have an effect on people's interests and lifestyle.
I will say that while pay doesn't feel as static as it used to, it hadn't kept pace with inflation. At the same time, recent innovations and new things are often not affordable. A new phone can cost more than a new computer did in the 90's - I don't really understand how an average person ever got by with a new iPhone every year or two.
I didn't live then either, but two thoughts immediately jump to mind:
The hippies were a minority part of a conterculture movement. And there were the civil rights movements getting broad traction. And the powers that be immediately took several steps to neutralize those movements.
Progress and blowback. And that gets reflected in the cultural output. Wonder why we have so many songs about anxiety and overdosing these days....
I think all your examples can easily be explained by other things. As for phones, as some one who loves new tech, phone tech has slowed down. There isn't much new and exciting that makes me feel I must get the new phone (I never cared about the camera other than taking good enough pics which they have done long ago at this point and faster speed is nice but it's not like I can't run things on a phone a few years old). And phones have gotten even more expensive and you don't see phone companies subsidizing them as much (it seems that is changing again though). It's the same reason why the sales of desktops and laptops stalled before, there isn't much new tech that really justifies or at least makes it exciting to keep updating all the time.
As for buttons on cars... touch screen is always going to be a horrible experience for using if you can't look at the screen to see where you are touching. There is nothing touch wise that will tell you what you are touching on the screen. In driving that makes for dangerous situations when everything is touch screen (I honestly think they should legislate that at least basic controls should still have physical buttons). You see car companies going to screens not cause it is better, but because it is cheaper for them (and they can look to be "technologically advanced" except people seem to have started realizign what I already could have told them... same reason I prefer my laptop to my ipad, a physical keyboard is better to type with than a touch screen... and I don't have to try to set up a keyboard to use one, it's already all in the laptop. I think tablets get away with it cause a lot of people aren't great at typing anyways so don't realize how much more awkward it is cause they have to look at their keyboard anyways to type).
I remember when phones were hailed as the replacement to desktops and laptops and people actively pushed this 'Post PC era' (esp the new-tech lovers), but fast forward 10 years later and most people still use your traditional PC setup for serious work. I really don't use my phone for anything else besides basic websurfing and video-watching, for most of my teen-life I had a gaming PC anyways. Desktops and Laptops have also stayed the same over the past decade, minus changes in how small the transistors are on a GPU or CPU - there is absolutely not a substantial difference as say, 1992 versus 1999 in computer technology, where the increase in CPU power went from 33mhz to 600 mhz. I don't even think the 'AI improvements' on newer CPUs is going to be anything specifically revolutionary, i.e Intel Ultra. I'd be interested to see the desktop version and assume it will mean faster training times...
I suspect this is because people adapt a technology which they think is futuristic by modeling their vehicles off of it, then realize that said tech isn't reliable and then phase it out. The result is a 'dork phase' where products exhibit this otherwise tacky design and stick out like a sore thumb in retrospect. I think I remember desktop computers also having touchscreens for a while (All-in-ones) and these were phased out as people realized that nobody wants to move around files with their fingers on a huge screen.
Ah, to be fair as much as I love new tech I never thought phones and tablets would replace PCs. way too awkward to use for serious work. I just liked that they let me use the internet anywhere and more as a device that lets me do stuff on the go but not as a replacement but more as a compromise where you don't have your computer with you. I will admit my laptop has replaced a desktop cause it doesn't compromise much (and really you can use it like a desktop if you really want) anymore and it has all the benefits (screen held up for me to see without me having to hold it up and a physical keyboard and all I have to do is open it, no trying to connect things to get them to work together).
And sadly the whole desktop having a touch screen hasn't been phased out, windows keeps tryign to do the tablet/pc hybrid and I see people griping about macs not following the trend (of being a mac user I'm really glad they haven't. I agree with steve jobs, it would be awkward trying to move stuff around on a screen held in front of me (he was against mac laptops having touch screens and I hope that sentiment remains since mac is my computer of choice). I can't remember right word I want to use but it's not comfortable (there's a better word but I can't frikking remember it, I swear I'm getting stupider as I get older).
Yes, I would say that maybe the most significant change in PCs in the past decade is the size of the gap in power/capability between desktops and laptops. As you note, there’s not much compromise in laptops any more.
Back then it was more or less the norm for the performance of even high end laptop CPUs to lag behind that of even midrange desktop CPUs by anywhere between 2-4 generations, but these days we have mobile CPUs with single threaded performance that’s as good or sometimes better than current gen desktop CPUs.
What’s more is that performance oriented laptops were only nominally portable massive bricks in the early 2010s (“desktop replacement” notebooks) where today laptops that are almost as portable as 2014 ultraportables can yield “desktop class” performance. It’s much more practical for a demanding user to go laptop-exclusive today than it was back then.
I was thinking about this, it seems another factor behind laptop and desktop gaps are graphics cards. I have a laptop from 1998 (Gateway) with a 500mhz pentium III and a desktop with a voodoo 3 and a similarly specced CPU. The Desktop blows away the laptop due to the graphics card, but otherwise both machines perform similarly for other applications (Like software-based dos games). Fast forward 10-12 years afterwards and the same principle applies, many laptops I used in the early 2010s were horrible gaming machines due to poor Intel HD Graphics support, and this included games like Minecraft and Terraria. Nowadays, it seems like this gap is shrinking in some aspects which means your average "demanding" user will go for a laptop moreso than a desktop.
To be fair these 'brick computers' still exist as gaming laptops, but they're often fitted with full RTX cards and sound like an F-16 taking off... Regardless a PC gamer will probably build their own Desktop which is just as popular as it was back then, barring the parts shortages
Integrated graphics as commonly used in laptops have definitely been improving. The GPU in Apple’s base model M1 through M4 for example is in the ballpark of entry level dedicated graphics cards, and that used in the Steam Deck’s APU has enough power to play the overwhelming majority of games reasonably well (albeit, with low-to-medium settings). Both are far cries from what used to be sold as integrated graphics and bring up the floor of GPU power in mass market machines quite a lot.
As far as gaming laptops go, while the huge bulky hot variants are still sold they’re much less popular than they used to be. Laptops like the Asus Zephyrus and Lenovo Legion models, which are only a little thicker than a Macbook Pro are powerful enough for most gamers’ needs and take the lions’ share of the market.
The M1 and successors are actually a great case study. A fantastic video, which I've left a brief summary below.
Apple was able to make an incredible 1-time leap by porting their phone tech into their other hardware, and could do it because of tight ecosystem control. But subsequent versions are hitting the same improvement problems as everyone else, and everyone else is catching up rapidly.
Definitely improving. I have a laptop with Iris graphics that I use for school and my PC gaming needs are met with a standard desktop computer (which is extremely powerful), but yes if you're playing the majority of PC games on the market then you'll be fine with a decent laptop. I suppose it comes down to preference between owning a Desktop or Laptop
Actually I'm thinking we're going further into a highly tech future.
But now we're slowly stopping in just having tech being it's own thing.
In my personal opinion a highly tech future is not only regarding speed and innovation on pure technology.
But also how this technology combines with our social constructs.
Just having Tech growth for the sake of tech is as far I'm concerned an outdated view.
It's most likely a statistical blip. I don't think there's any reason to think;
There are a lot of assumptions made in this chain of logic, and I don't think they are likely. Especially the second and third points.