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This is your brain on technology. Get help. (Image by techinfographics. com)
“New and improved” is now an oxymoron. Every single day my cell phone tells me that 10 or 20 apps have been “updated” and none of them ever work better. Instead, a phone that worked perfectly when I got it now tells me, 10 to 20 times a day, “Unfortunately, Moto has stopped.” The operating rule in technology for years now has been, if it isn’t broke, graft something onto it so we can advertise it as new and improved.
Why does every coffee maker come with a clock? Because consumers have been banging their pitchforks on the iron gates of the appliance companies, chanting “We want clocks!”? No. They do it because they can. Likewise with variable-strength settings, and delayed-start. Now they’re connecting the coffee pots to the Internet of Things so we can talk to them about coffee with our smartphones. I don’t want to discuss coffee with my coffee pot. I just want a damn cup of coffee.
Okay the examples so far are trivial. These aren’t:
- More cars broke down and stranded their occupants on the road in 2015 than in any year on record. The main culprit, according to AAA: technology.
- Farmers in several states are campaigning to win the right to repair their own machines, while manufacturers claim the farmers only lease the technology that makes the thing run, and any problem has to be handled by a certified technician in a company-owned service center. Tell a farmer that when, in harvest time, his $400,000 combine is sitting silent in a field containing his annual income for lack of a 100-dollar oxygen sensor. Then step back.
- Long-haul truckers are desperate to escape the rising costs of technology — some of it mandated to control emissions. “The engines and drive trains of these new trucks are good for a million miles, easy,” one operator told me. “But the technology starts shutting them down after about 20,000 miles.” Nothing like having a refrigerated 18-wheeler stopped on an Interstate ramp in Florida because a crankshaft-position sensor is hallucinating.
- Now comes the Internet of Things, featuring devices connected to the Internet via your Wifi system so you can use your smart phone to feed your dog, adjust the thermostat in your empty house, adjust your refrigerator temperature (something I personally have not done more than twice in 50 years), adjust the lighting in your empty house, and other necessary things.
There is no question that automobiles, for example, are far better today than they were 30 years ago, mainly because of improvements in the machining of engine and drive-train parts. We used to have to drive a car a thousand miles at painfully slow speeds to “seat” the valves and rings and bearings, which meant, let them bang against each other until they fit better. Even when properly broken in, and most of us didn’t wait to exceed 60 miles per hour, it was rare for an engine to last 100,000 miles. Now, precision tools have done away with the break-in period, and at least tripled the life expectancy of engines. Score one for technology.
Now consider the matter of the ignition key. Was this a huge problem? Were people calling customer service and demanding a black box with a battery in it to carry around, instead of a key?
Never mind. Here’s your black box, because the engineers are proud of it and the marketers think it has legs. Forget about worrying where your keys are, just leave the box in the car. (Whoops. Kills the car battery. Which disables the car locks. Which you need to operate to get at the battery. Snag.) Okay, leave it on a shelf inside the house. (Which might be close enough to the car to allow you to start it and leave, not discovering that you don’t have the box until you get where you’re going and shut off the car. Snag.)
As we patch and fix and tinker to deal with such unintended consequences, and add on the newest insane ideas of the engineers, the software required to run a car has become bloated and bug-bitten. It takes 100 million lines of software to get you on your way. All of Facebook operates on 60 million lines.
In fact, according to a new book Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, the sheer size of these programs, with their fixes and patches and now interactions over Wifi and Internet networks, is exceeding the ability of the human mind to comprehend them. Hm. Sounds like it’s time for driverless cars. What could go wrong?
Moreover, the opportunities for malware have been increased by orders of magnitude. It is now possible to insert an infected CD in a car’s player which, when played, will disable the car’s brakes.
And the growth goes on. In every field of endeavor, the engineers and the marketers high-five each other every time they come up with some new feature that nobody needs, but everybody can be convinced they ought to have. (“No, really! It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”)
There is nothing in nature that grows continuously except cancerous tumors that eventually kill their hosts. That is what technology is doing now — getting so big and ponderous that it is beginning to endanger the systems it was supposed to be helping.
It’s called the Growth Economy for a reason – growing piles of crap.
Thanks for writing this, this rant has been sitting in my mind’s ‘stuff I need to write someday to get it out of my head folder’ for a while now, good job! Both my wife and I decided to keep our older vehicles, and just treat them and us with some minor overhauls and new paint because both get us where we need to go, neither has ever left us at the side of the road, and everything still works, except the clock display in her fancy Nissan….
Now don’t get me wrong here, Mr. Lewis – I’m no Luddite. I not only agree with the point of your essay, but i can take it much further. I firmly believe that technology is the mechanism by which we’re killing the planet (and in the process committing suicide).
All of it – medical breakthroughs, burgeoning scientific discoveries, and the explosion of the internet into every aspect of our lives – is quickening the pace of decay, pollution, resource depletion and creating many other problems (that we conveniently ignore). Just yesterday a group of Russians had a press conference where they claim to have the technology to transmute any element into any other element (what could go wrong, indeed)!
Genetic engineering has lead directly to Monsanto and others that are poisoning us while touting the ability to clone our beloved dead dog. Medicine in general has lead directly to overpopulation and therefore faster resource depletion. Automobiles, since their creation, are pollution spewing rust buckets that end up in the weeds of some long forgotten farm. TV was almost the worst invention ever by humans, but now that the internet is here, it’s been eclipsed as the best propaganda sewer pipe to your mind. Banks enhanced by computers have given us fractional reserve banking which has lead directly to the world-wide economic collapse we’re expecting any day now. If you go to the airport and the computer is down, no one is going anywhere.
Oh the wonders of technology.
I have been an ASE Master Mechanic Automobiles (a 5 year rating) and a fleet mechanic for over 2 years. The 1980’s cars were mechanical monsters to meet the pollution requirements. The 1990 vehicles were a welcome improvement. Now my son takes his BMW to the dealer for an oil change plus and drops $400.00 for extras. Not my idea of progress. OK if you can afford it, but the system does not give a damn about us retires.
On a recent motor trip (I try to get thru the slow pokes and find a open spot in Interstate mob to cruise) the pack actually got up to 90 mph for quite a long time. It is great fun and requires strict attention AND GOOD WEATHER. All interstate highways must be a minimum of 3 lanes in each direction. 2 lanes promotes crazy driving.
The internet of things must be the stupidest attempt to delay the inevitable decline in the ability of a system to make us buy shit we don’t need.
I can’t read about it without having a sarcastic grin of smug contempt …
But they try…Oh! do they try ! lol
It’s like Apple with their stupid fucking watch; it ‘has ‘Limits to Growth brought to you by the Law of Diminishing Returns’ written in underlined bold all over it.
It reeks of desperation…
I posted your essay on http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/07/27/collapse-due-to-complex-technology/ with some lead in comments last night. So far it has received 23 comments. It seems to have struck a deep seated frustration with many.
Thanks Roy. There’s still something about misery and company, isn’t there?
Guy muses on the same theme, Mr. Lewis. Synchronicity.
http://guymcpherson.com/2016/07/the-guaranteed-ending/
[where he says:]
In other words, according to this perspective, our demise was guaranteed when the first technologically advanced civilization arose. As we know from myriad examples on Earth, uncivilized societies are capable of persisting for many thousands of years (at least). In contrast, there are at least six paths to near-term human extinction on Earth, each rooted in civilization. It seems we are following the extinction path as if it’s a handbook.
The stark reality is that the technical systems of industrialized civilization irreversibly uses up limited natural material resources, provides an irrevocably aging infrastructure that humans have grown dependent on, produces material wastes with such unintended consequences as land sea and air pollution, climate disruption and ocean acidification. Anthropocentric discussions, even those taking this reality into account, can not possibly do more that lead to measures that will ease the inevitable powering down for some.
So many examples of, Just because we can, should we? But the Marketeers have been selling us stuff we don’t need for ages. We built this consumer-based economy bed we’re lying in.
We are slowly technogizing ourselves into extinction. Technology is seductive. Is it the power? Is it the comfort? Or is it some internal particularly human attribute that drives it? Technology surrounds us and becomes part of our story and myths. Technology tantalizes the human mind to make, combine, invent. There are always unintended consequences with technology. It effects how we experience the world in time and space. It affects how we feel the world. If all the externalities were included in the prices and cost to nature, we would be very, very wary of technology.
I think we have moved from technology in the service of religion (pyramids and gothic cathedrals) to religion and culture in the service of technology. It isn’t a deity that will save humanity but in the eyes of many – it will be technology.
We will do more of the same, business as usual until there are no more holes in the ground to dig, no more water above and below to contaminate, no humans to wage slave, no other lifeforms to eliminate. Yes, we are building Trojan horses in our hearts, minds and spirits. It will be elitist and entitlement and hubris – it will end with both a bang and a whimper.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-bang-and-whimper.html
Yep… I see the burgeoning avalanche of techno-shit as basically a frantic way for our current industrial/commercial culture to keep afloat – while our environment (and social stability) degrades. Plus we have to deal with the ‘geek’ (aka Engineer’s ) mentality .. and digital technology just makes it so much easier to continually add complexity – “Hey Sue, just thought of a new app for the phone .. Why don’t we calculate the caffeine content of people through their Starbuck orders – I’m sure the health nuts would love it – and Starbucks would too, I think it will only be 250 Mb – plenty of room on Android”. AARRRGGGHH! … also …https://theconversation.com/please-rewind-a-final-farewell-to-the-vcr-63050 and so we go…