Why Nothing Works Anymore – Technology No Longer Serves Human Ends

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.

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.

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.

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

Why do we always think like this?