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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

> It is already shocking to a certain degree seeing very young people not being able to use a vehicle in the narrow sense because all they ever learned were the mechanical controls of the so-called automobile.

We could do this forever.

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I think there's a fallacy where someone points out one instance of a larger trend which will, when taken to its logical progression, lead to an undesired effect; and then someone attempts to rebut the claim by pointing out that the trend has existed before and the undesired effect hasn't happened yet, so any concern is nugatory. I'd call it the grippery slope fallacy, complement to the slippery one: we haven't fallen down the slope yet, so we can't fall down it. What if an individual instance of ignorance is acceptable because people still need to have understanding in other areas, but if all understanding everywhere is eliminated then we all suffer?

the difference is that an automatic transmission doesn't make the car work worse. The modern UX landscape would rather board up a room because the door has a sharp handle than figure out how to make the handle less sharp

ETA: Or, to put it in car terms, we were all forced to take cabs (except for the people who were interested in driving, who became cab drivers) because car crashes happen or my sand eating neighbour couldn't tell which pedal was the brakes

It wasn't all that long ago that automatic transmissions had significantly worse reliability and fuel efficiency than manual transmissions.

Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.

I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.

Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.

My read is that there does seem a clear difference between simple -> advanced machines vs simple -> "smart" machines. Nearly every smart machine is bullshit enshitification-in-waiting. Rent-seeking in-waiting. Smart tvs, smart cars with touch-screens. some would argue apple products. These things proclaim advancements but what they really do is black-box and dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, then quite literally impose control over the air, and shove ads to you.

I'm all for just getting to where I need to go by using the appropriate tool, like a reliable car. But no not if it means foregoing the liberty of other options.

I think the dumbing down of things is a closely related yet adjacent issue. And I too absolutely despise the enshitification you’re describing.

I drove a BMW rental recently, and I swear it felt like I was driving around a toy. Such obvious HCI usability concerns, even my wife (non techie) was appalled and able to call out many obvious and stupid design decisions. It felt like a vibe coded car. A vision of the future, no doubt.

No. No economy ever had essentially every single major company spending a significant fraction of its budget on hiring auto mechanics. Which is to say, for all the changes the automobile wrought, the role of the computer in industrialized society eclipses it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold. For an individual in many modern societies, being denied access to a car is already effectively crippling, and the idea of being denied access to computation threatens to be somehow even worse.

I would say you need to read some history.

While the role of computers in industrialized society has been substantial, there's still a pretty good argument that the rise of motorized transportation, refridgeration, electricity, the telegram and antibiotics each exceed the impact of computer technology.

In 3-500 years we might have enough perspective on this to really judge it; I'm pretty sure that all we can say right now is "don't know".

This time is different though (which has also been said every single time). But I'm worried this time it's true (also said every time). Doesn't help with the unease though.

The scale of it is certainly different, if nothing else

We have never before seen every single profession disrupted to this degree, not even the introduction of the personal computer introduced such a dramatic shift

(in recent memory). Surely the industrial revolution was a much larger disruption.

Maybe? Either way, we're still talking about one of the largest disruptions that global society has ever had

A person dies every 26 seconds in a road traffic incident somewhere in the world. A big part of that is people using machines they do not understand.

In what sense do they not understand it? What could we teach them that they don't already know?

They don't understand the dangers involved because the soft suspension and airtight cabin shield them from it. They don't have an intuitive sense of speed, force, momentum, traction etc. because they never rode a bicycle and fell off.

Almost no part of that is due to people using machines they do not understand.

You mean as a distraction from the point being made?

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