It’s not how you get promoted though. Plus implementing complex UIs is challenging which engineers like. The incentives are off.
Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!
Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.”
Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.
Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping.
Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature.
PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/
I reckon it's more that some Apple VP has to justify their million dollar equity package by creating work for their org, because otherwise why should you still have a job?
> People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism
Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.
Why is capitalist competition worse than any other form of competition? Wouldn’t wartime competition over land and sovereignty be far worse? Didn’t the Soviet Union have extreme forms of political competition?
Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?
Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).
Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.
Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.
Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.
The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.
It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.