I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.
In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.
I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.
When I was a kid in the 90s, my grandparents never wanted to get cable television, despite watching a lot of local broadcasts. Their children (and grandchildren) thought they would truly enjoy it: more live sports, history documentaries, and so on. They thought it would be low quality trash.
As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)
Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.
It goes beyond that: what we call technology is inherently "abstraction of service", (ultimately all of which is related to boiling water for some reason???) and at a certain point too many layers of abstraction is more complicated than helpful in terms of reducing the amount of time spent interacting with the "work reduction layer".
Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was
1. call milkman
2. get milk & pay for next milk
now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work.
That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.
Perhaps people that are older have seen that sometimes new technology is not all benefit. You are trading something. Once you are old enough, and have seen it happen enough times, you start considering all the good and exciting things that have been traded away over the years.
Short answer is yes. Most grandparents resisted computers, internet, cellphones or online banking until the network effect left them with little choice but to participate. You also see them glom onto popular platforms (Faceboook, WhatsApp) and not experiment much with alternatives (Discord, Snapchat). Driven by the same effect, they're only there because that's where their families and friends are.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
I feel the same way. I think the difference is that new tech used to be an improvement to your life. New tech is there simply to suck life (your attention) and money away from you.
There are exceptions of course, But the general trend is worrying.
I am not part of the group being polled (firmly ensconced in middle age), but I feel the opposite. Yes, the AI roll out has been shambolic to say the least, and it can also be annoyingly intrusive. On the plus side, AI is allowing me to take on projects that I would never have bothered in the past because the learning curve would have been too arduous. I am currently reverse engineering an embedded system going in there with a multimeter and logic analyzer. It is a lot of fun and I am learning a ton. If you told me five years ago that I would eventually be taking on such a project, I would not have believed you. On the job side, a lot of what I do involves troubleshooting (e.g., looking at reams of logs), and there too AI has been a boon. So, yes, actually excited about where things are going (with some misgivings).
>But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
i'm 24. I think that improvements in tech nowadays mostly involve the hobbyist of any niche, while the general public is ever more satisfied with what already exists.
sd to hd to full hd was cool, full hd to 1440p i can see the difference, at 4k yes but it is not so big. Miniled is something people won't really care about imho (and they can already go very bright, i'm only waiting for more minileds to be integrated in monitors before changing mine).
Audio, well, most people will be satisfied with cheap razer/gaming/bose/whatever headphones are there. Sure anc is cool if you're in a noisy environment quite often
Bikes, well at 24yo i'm not really knowledgeable to say whether a bianchi that costs more than a motorbike is worth the upgrade from an older model... but ebikes are kinda nice even for people outside of the cycling world
However, what has happened with audio and video - and a change that i can perceive -, is the prices of things (not cpu/gpu related, for obvious reasons) coming down. oleds were so espensive ten years ago, now they are not. 4k minileds monitor are as expensive now as my regular non miniled 1440p va monitor from ~4/5 years ago. Hifiman has (permanently) slashed the prices of its headphones more than once over the years. It is not exciting as new tech but it is "just" nice
p.s. wifi printers are a pain in the ass much more than cable printes, and for llms i am kinda happy with them, i'll give you that, they're a godsend for studying; i'm less excited about the idea they'll replace most workers
We have self-driving cars and near-human AIs. And yet the author can't find something to get excited about?!?!?
I'm slightly older than he is and I lived through all those changes he talks about. I'm still in awe every time I fire up Codex. This article sounds like depression talking.
I used to be like that. I would pore over feature matrices in Computer Shopper ads and pick out stuff I couldn't afford and wasn't going to buy.
Then, about 7 years ago I realized that for the first time, I was more or less happy with the tech in my life. My computer was good, I liked my phone, my tablet, and my ereader. I had a good TV and stereo I used all the time. The appliances in my home are reliable and work well. The tools I use in my garage and yard are all fine. With Android Auto or Car Play (I've used both) even my car felt like it had crossed some threshold of being good enough that I didn't really have the itch for something better.
I had been working full time for 30ish years and had accumulated a lot of stuff that makes my life better and there really isn't much more that I want and certainly nothing that I need. When Christmas rolls around and people want gift ideas for me, it's hard for me to think of things. My favorite thing in the world is to have a few days off and no plans or commitments and I can sort drill bits, change my guitar strings, watch a movie, or take a nap.
What used to be a super computing center now fits in my pocket and runs on batteries. I haven't tried, but I'm reasonably sure my phone can emulate a Cray-1 at faster than the original.
> If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
I’m 29 so I guess I just barely qualify haha. But overall, I agree with your writing and can say as a technologist myself, I also rarely get excited about new technology - nor do my peers.
There are occasional exceptions though. Near the beginning of this current GenAI revolution, I was frequently excited. Watching that SpaceX rocket land back on earth had me on the edge of my seat. I also recently bought AirPods and found the conversation awareness feature to be incredible. Similarly, I got my first fitness tracker and find it mind blowing how much it can measure by just zapping my wrist with light.
This is good because there are much better places to find fulfillment.
It's like when you get a new smartphone and you baby it for those first couple weeks until, bam, it falls and gets a ding in it. Then after a brief sense of loss, you suddenly see it as a tool with utility and a lifespan. I think that's where you want to be with material things and technology.
I am a bit over 50. Most new computer tech doesn't hit me like it used to but occasionally I still get hit with wonder. I got that feeling trying the Apple Vision Pro in store demo. 50-something me still can't believe I have AI at my fingertips.
For the most part though it's not that new tech isn't cool but as I get older, parts of life which seemed mundane as a kid or young man aren't quite so mundane anymore. As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background. With years I see those moments with loved ones as precious, finite, and what it's all about. Tech is neat and sometimes very neat ... but it isn't what it's all about.
> As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background.
So true. I even thought family was annoying. Now that most are gone ( some dead, some barely keeping in touch ) I understand, too late, they were what it’s all about for sure.
Tools for Conviviality (Ivan Illich) has this idea about the two watersheds of new technology.
During the first watershed, it solves an actual problem + improves the lives of those who adopt it.
During the second watershed, it gets institutionalized and the technology shifts into something that requires people serve it rather than serving those it’s intended to help.
His examples are all old technologies like modern medicine, non party line wired phones, the radio, etc. but the ideas fit the shape of the technological advances we’re seeing in our lifetimes as well.
Echoing others here, but I think part of it is that a lot of the new tech is designed to make things worse.
If I think about new tech, all the examples that immediately spring to mind are negative ones: surveillance cameras, AI-enabled spam & propaganda, autonomous weaponry.
The less flashy advances tend to be harder to get excited about, and they're also often negative. My computers get more expensive, but they also collect more data on me, and it's harder to get one without a bunch of unwanted features.
People used to be excited about new tech because it was exciting and aspirational; I think we've lost a lot of that.
It isn’t that surprising that computers have become somewhat crap as they’ve gained ubiquitous adoption (that’s just the nature of appealing to everyone). IMO it is more surprising that nothing has really filled in that gap.
VR is probably the coolest new tech of the last decade to me, hanging out with friends and exploring weird spaces is so wild (sure there are lots of flaws and limitations but it's definitely exciting and new to me even as a jaded, increasingly luddite programmer)
there are still new things and fun tech, don't give up!
One thing I've thought about for a long time, as someone who's been interested in new technology and sci-fi for a long time:
you still need to work; still need a job.
With all this new technology that does things for us, there will be new things that need doing in order that we can pay for the things that do the old things for us.
Consider that it's probably not tech but rather a cycle of aesthetics you're experiencing.
Just like films, music, or even sports, there are eras of a certain paradigm or aesthetic. What we consider the 'peak' is always evaluated in retrospect or in comparison to a previous peak. Neurologically, humans are naturally predisposed to evaluate the world in terms of "how much pleasure" an activity gives, and when you experience "more pleasure" (for example, riding a fast rollercoaster vs. a slow one) then the previous experience is often discarded or treated as inferior. In some cases that's true, but, by and large, these comparisons are again purely psychic in nature.
What you viewed as more exciting was an age where advertising didn't cheapen your experiences. Overexposure/stimulation as a means of advertising, co-opted with combining social media with advertising to a startling degree is the true culprit behind what you're seeing, and as a captive audience, like the prisoners in Plato's cave, you are unable to look away...
The last technology that truly excited me was the ebook. I truly believe is one of the greatest gadgets ever invented. It's just fantastic the disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package.
Don't worry, you're just getting old. It happens to all of us. At some point we simply stop being excited about new shiny things and start to prefer stuff we know and rely on. In especially bad cases, some start seeing new shiny things as threat to the stability of their lives.
Now that you mention it, yeah.
I remember my mom doing the watch this microwave thing boil a cup of water demo for months everytime someone stopped by. It was a show.
The last one I remember like this, with both "I want to show" and "I want see" high demand like that, was the Siri launch. Someone in my office got it running and he had people coming to his cubicle all day asking to hear it.
The marginal payoff from incremental innovation produces lesser and lesser endorphins as we age. They increasingly become a smaller part of our experiences.
And btw, by and large, this happens to every feeling, not just excitement from technological innovation.
> Of course nowadays days I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.
I know a lot of people have a troubled relationship to their phone, but this is really surprising to me. Would I want to go back to a world where I can't conveniently contact people, navigate the world, look up anything I want to know in an second, and set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer? Not even a little bit.
The last time I personally felt the excitement the author describes was probably with the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, but unfortunately that product went nowhere.
> set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer?
I know it's mainly in jest, but this always strikes me as an odd example of 'high tech'. It feels like a 'first you create the universe' solution to using an egg timer with doughy fingers. Egg timers are simple devices that clean easy and can handle dough transfer. They are (or perhaps only 'were ') built as fit for purpose.
Yes, it's just an extra thing the 'high tech' can do, but damn it's an awful example of the (reached) potential of high tech.
A better example could be:
I can ask the air to buy me a big mac and have it paid for and delivered to my house within 30 minutes all while I'm changing a nappy and putting the baby to bed. There's a whole stack of systems needing to communicate to make that thing happen.
I used to not be excited about the next consumer tech gadget or the next JS framework, but I am now pretty excited about transforming new tech now (AI, energy, space, etc).
I'm excited about self driving cars for aging boomer and drunk mobility. Most consumer tech seems to be pure agitation and slop. Can't seem to think that ways to engage media is getting better (paid streaming now with ads etc.) TVs take a forever to change channel, call quality seems to be worse than analog etc.
Self-driving cars are really cool but they won't really solve our transit problems, they'll probably just make them worse and more expensive. We should be focusing on better development patterns (appropriate density - not skyscrapers and not suburbia), walking, biking, and hopping on a tram or something along those lines.
Self-driving cars are an additive technology, and there is certainly a place for them, but they should be at best (like all cars) your 3rd or maybe even 4th best option for daily activities.
You are absolutely right, and the only negative is the utopian-esque description, therefore it'll never quite work as well as it should - but I think aiming for that will still get something better than what we've got.
Your comment just made me think about the whole self-driving car thing as an extension of the car-centric thinking of the US (and how car-centricity is essentially anti-social, but that's beside the point), and now even the US is losing the car race to China, but it will maintain it's car-centric philosophy based on momentum rather than practicality. Could public transport be a national security priority? (mostly tongue in cheek, but just a smidge not).
Yea, it is an extension. It's additive. The safest car is the one that's parked. Car-centric culture has a lot of negative externalities. But the entire society is geared toward cars and propping them up. Cars themselves, auto jobs, departments of highways, tires, oil, gas, insurance, fast food, COSTCO, you name it. Most of those things can be replaced with something as simple as a sidewalk and better urban planning. If your goal is to prop up an industry, self-driving cars will do that for you.
If your goal is to increase autonomy [1], wealth, entrepreneurship, and happiness and decrease death and health concerns, racism, obesity, and other things you need to move away from car-only building and design patterns. I also think busses are a problem because they just reinforce bad habits. For most municipalities a bus is just a worse version of your car which is why they're largely unsuccessful for the masses. Bike/walk/rail is, in my view, quite literally the only good path forward for future transportation development.
I don't think the US is losing the car race to China though. What race? Why are we even in a race all of a sudden? I drive an EV and like them but aside from emissions I'm not sure one is really all that better than another (I find EVs more convenient though).
[1] Been a bad person lately? Maybe the government and the vehicle facial recognition technology says sorry no driving for you. Now what? Secondarily for the elderly (as the single-issue voter OP has mentioned) walking/biking/rail allows for better outcomes and for folks to participate more in daily life. Driving becomes more and more hazardous as we age and folks wind up stuck at home.
* Putting down the throttle of my first BEV was magic (a rented ID3 Pro rented, it's not even performing like mad, but RWD gets it done).
I laughed manically and in tears until arriving at home.
Even laid back acceleration is still fun.
ICE cars have become boring to me.
* The first time generating a longer working script with ChatGPT in its early incarnation was great!
Correcting a broken web app by a junior dev with the help of Claude and ChatGPT was also crazy the first time.
* Letting the drone of my brother in law start and land from my hand, making incredible camera moves by pushing a few buttons was surreal.
* Hearing the first sounds of my mobile with Dolby Atmos was also like hallucinating. These tiny speakers have become unbelievable good for media consumption.
* Playing a recent e-piano that even mimics damper and co-vibrating strings. The improvements in tactile and acoustic experience are subtle but great
* I cannot wait to test a tone3000 neural amp modeling thingy -- the first time I heard a Kemper and tested even the basic Pod Go was also great.
* First picture of a laser projector: blown away.
Next level of sharp picture.
- 90s:
- video games were something truly new. before it, stories and fantasy was something to be enjoyed mostly through static medium. and games were the first medium that lets you interactively enjoy stories.
- internet was something truly new. never before we get to connect with people by sharing things we create. and there's so many things were created out of genuine love and passion
- late 2000s - social media were something truly new. it lets you connect with people and share things
every era brought something truly novel to the table. but then something changed mid 2010s. and it's not entirely megacorps' fault. it's also us customers. we didn't want to pay. and thus the business model that promotes enshittified services were born and now we have to live with it.
I've been playing Project Zomboid with my friends. It's an isometric survival game set in 1993 in a fictional area around Louisville, Kentucky. It has VHS tapes, TV and radio broadcasts, ham radio, CDs, and landlines in it. So far in my playing experience, there's no real internet component.
There's some sort of disease outbreak that turns people into zombies and society starts to collapse. Eventually things like the power grid and water/sewage infrastructure break down. Food rots. Gasoline runs out. It's basically guaranteed that you and your teammates will die in this game.
Even after living through a pandemic and all of the shit that came with it, and despite the grim atmosphere of the game, I still miss the time period that this game symbolized. I know I was only a child during the 90s and the era had its real problems, but there were good things about it and the state of technology at the time that have gotten worse in the decades since.
It was a time when media was a physical good and had meaning, when there wasn't a constant deluge of information, when my attention was less valuable than advertisers have made it today, and there was, at least for the majority of society, a shared informational reality.
That's all gone and there are massively powerful interests working to make sure it stays gone.
High quality eBikes are pretty amazing: I have nearly 4000 miles on one of ours, and nearly all of those are replacing car trips around town, including most of our grocery shopping.
While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.
Last year I purchased an e-scooter (Hiboy X300)to compliment my car. I used it so much, I accidentally let my car rot into disrepair. The e-scooter is great, but it is quite limited in what you can carry (only what you can put in a backpack). Instead of getting another car for the things that I can't really use the scooter for, I got an acoustic, belt driven bike :) (the Priority 600). I went acoustic and belt driven specifically to compliment the shortcomings of the e-scooter (other than the carrying capacity, which any bike is an improvement on), in that I don't have to worry about it failing in any weather that I throw at it, rain, snow or shine. There is no battery to get too cold and no electrical system to get too wet.
Had I known I were going to be getting rid of my car, an e-bike would have definitely been a better value. I feel lucky that things worked out the way that they did though - having both an e-scooter and an acoustic bike has been great!
Do you hate e-bikes, or do you hate city planning that treats e-bikes as second-class citizens, and forces them into direct competition with cars and pedestrians?
I hate the people who ride e-bikes on the sidewalk and act as if they have the right of way. They always ride their e-bikes too recklessly and push their way through. More often than not, they have terrible hand-eye coordination, and they may even be trying to use their phone at the same time.
The cheap radios boggle my mind a little bit. I can order a wireless transmitter for an electric guitar for cheaper than the cable next to it. How is this possible? $18 ESP32 with a camera attached and WiFi for an instant cheap IP camera? Crazy!
Those kitchen advances never feel like advances to me though. Maybe I'm over simplifying it, but I'm tired of "needing" yet another box that gets hot. I am pretty sure an air fryer is just a small convection oven.
You can take my panini press from my cold dead hands though.
Tech is no longer exciting to me because I no longer feel a connection between tech improvement and world (or personal life) improvement.
I used to read sci fi for the wonder, but now I read it with dread, for Chekov's Gun is a Torment Nexus, and if you introduce a Torment Nexus in Act 1 of a sci fi dystopia, it will be fired IRL by act 3.
Deeper lurks a more chilling question: what, on a dying planet run by fascists, should I do with my time?
You do have to move your focus for sure. Gadgets used to be cool, but now you'd have to look at SpaceX or Stoke for space, and all the crazy ambitious fusion startups, or Quaise. Those are the ones I'm tracking at least..
I'm getting old, but it seems like we're all more ambivalent about new tech. Maybe I'm projecting, but we don't expect tech to be the solution to human problems as much as we used to. The boundless optimism about the World Wide Web has putrified into techno-pessimism for at least half of us.
In my hobbies and other real world activities I cross paths with people in their 20s a lot. It’s really refreshing to see their excitement about new technologies and the future, contrasted with all the cynicism you get when you spend time in places with a lot of jaded adults who wish the world would stop changing.
I think it’s natural to wish that technology would pause right at the point in your life and career where you’ve got it all figured out and lose your appetite for new things. It feels good to be on top of it all and feel like your knowledge, routines, and career skills are never going to go out of style. It feels uncomfortable when the world continues to change after you’ve settled into something familiar and routine.
My grandfathers both benefited greatly from new technology of their times like hearing aids and various cardiac interventions.
I don’t like a TV reporting analytics either, but if we’re looking at technological advancements as a whole that seems like small potatoes.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Computers also was one of them. But modern media boxes are not exciting. Microcontrollers though, are still exciting.
As a birthday gift, my mother tried to give them a lifetime cable subscription so they could see what they were missing. When the technician from the cable company showed up at their door, my grandmother stared at him through a slit in the blinds and refused to let him in or otherwise acknowledge him. I pitied them, and we joked behind their backs about how stuck in their ways they were. (Writing this as an adult, I can't imagine why my mom would insist on trying to give them a gift that they had overtly rejected.)
Years later, my grandparents gave in to cable. We were right: they did enjoy watching more Big 12 football. But they also enjoyed watching endless hours of Fox News. They became increasingly isolated, paranoid, and overtly racist. I won't blame 100% of this change on Fox News, but their transition toward hate absolutely poisoned their relationships with most of the family. I don't think that's exactly what my grandmother expected when she refused the cable man on her birthday, but she was still right.
It’s a personal feeling. Once you get comfortable with the way the world is, you start wishing it would stop changing.
Your grandparents complaint is essentially that "github is good, but writing tests, and using CI/CD is too abstract and complicated". Which is fair, especially if you aren't talking about something for intelligent people in specific. Compare ordering milk with a milkman vs. the modern way. Previously the loop was
1. call milkman 2. get milk & pay for next milk
now it can be a number of various paths (all of which are correct, confusingly!) to get milk delivered to one's door. Too much abstraction is no longer serving as a means of replacing work at this point, and managing the abstraction becomes a form of work.
That's the real complaint. Happy 2 hear ur thoughts about this 1.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
There are exceptions of course, But the general trend is worrying.
i'm 24. I think that improvements in tech nowadays mostly involve the hobbyist of any niche, while the general public is ever more satisfied with what already exists.
sd to hd to full hd was cool, full hd to 1440p i can see the difference, at 4k yes but it is not so big. Miniled is something people won't really care about imho (and they can already go very bright, i'm only waiting for more minileds to be integrated in monitors before changing mine).
Audio, well, most people will be satisfied with cheap razer/gaming/bose/whatever headphones are there. Sure anc is cool if you're in a noisy environment quite often
Bikes, well at 24yo i'm not really knowledgeable to say whether a bianchi that costs more than a motorbike is worth the upgrade from an older model... but ebikes are kinda nice even for people outside of the cycling world
However, what has happened with audio and video - and a change that i can perceive -, is the prices of things (not cpu/gpu related, for obvious reasons) coming down. oleds were so espensive ten years ago, now they are not. 4k minileds monitor are as expensive now as my regular non miniled 1440p va monitor from ~4/5 years ago. Hifiman has (permanently) slashed the prices of its headphones more than once over the years. It is not exciting as new tech but it is "just" nice
p.s. wifi printers are a pain in the ass much more than cable printes, and for llms i am kinda happy with them, i'll give you that, they're a godsend for studying; i'm less excited about the idea they'll replace most workers
I'm slightly older than he is and I lived through all those changes he talks about. I'm still in awe every time I fire up Codex. This article sounds like depression talking.
It may be the same stuff we had 20 years ago, but the specs!
What was a supercomputer before is now just a component in a datacenter, one of 72 per rack.
Then, about 7 years ago I realized that for the first time, I was more or less happy with the tech in my life. My computer was good, I liked my phone, my tablet, and my ereader. I had a good TV and stereo I used all the time. The appliances in my home are reliable and work well. The tools I use in my garage and yard are all fine. With Android Auto or Car Play (I've used both) even my car felt like it had crossed some threshold of being good enough that I didn't really have the itch for something better.
I had been working full time for 30ish years and had accumulated a lot of stuff that makes my life better and there really isn't much more that I want and certainly nothing that I need. When Christmas rolls around and people want gift ideas for me, it's hard for me to think of things. My favorite thing in the world is to have a few days off and no plans or commitments and I can sort drill bits, change my guitar strings, watch a movie, or take a nap.
I’m 29 so I guess I just barely qualify haha. But overall, I agree with your writing and can say as a technologist myself, I also rarely get excited about new technology - nor do my peers.
There are occasional exceptions though. Near the beginning of this current GenAI revolution, I was frequently excited. Watching that SpaceX rocket land back on earth had me on the edge of my seat. I also recently bought AirPods and found the conversation awareness feature to be incredible. Similarly, I got my first fitness tracker and find it mind blowing how much it can measure by just zapping my wrist with light.
It's like when you get a new smartphone and you baby it for those first couple weeks until, bam, it falls and gets a ding in it. Then after a brief sense of loss, you suddenly see it as a tool with utility and a lifespan. I think that's where you want to be with material things and technology.
For the most part though it's not that new tech isn't cool but as I get older, parts of life which seemed mundane as a kid or young man aren't quite so mundane anymore. As a teenager it seemed like family and loved ones were just there and part of the normal background. With years I see those moments with loved ones as precious, finite, and what it's all about. Tech is neat and sometimes very neat ... but it isn't what it's all about.
So true. I even thought family was annoying. Now that most are gone ( some dead, some barely keeping in touch ) I understand, too late, they were what it’s all about for sure.
You don't.
During the first watershed, it solves an actual problem + improves the lives of those who adopt it.
During the second watershed, it gets institutionalized and the technology shifts into something that requires people serve it rather than serving those it’s intended to help.
His examples are all old technologies like modern medicine, non party line wired phones, the radio, etc. but the ideas fit the shape of the technological advances we’re seeing in our lifetimes as well.
If I think about new tech, all the examples that immediately spring to mind are negative ones: surveillance cameras, AI-enabled spam & propaganda, autonomous weaponry.
The less flashy advances tend to be harder to get excited about, and they're also often negative. My computers get more expensive, but they also collect more data on me, and it's harder to get one without a bunch of unwanted features.
People used to be excited about new tech because it was exciting and aspirational; I think we've lost a lot of that.
there are still new things and fun tech, don't give up!
you still need to work; still need a job.
With all this new technology that does things for us, there will be new things that need doing in order that we can pay for the things that do the old things for us.
I still find this a jarring thought.
Just like films, music, or even sports, there are eras of a certain paradigm or aesthetic. What we consider the 'peak' is always evaluated in retrospect or in comparison to a previous peak. Neurologically, humans are naturally predisposed to evaluate the world in terms of "how much pleasure" an activity gives, and when you experience "more pleasure" (for example, riding a fast rollercoaster vs. a slow one) then the previous experience is often discarded or treated as inferior. In some cases that's true, but, by and large, these comparisons are again purely psychic in nature.
What you viewed as more exciting was an age where advertising didn't cheapen your experiences. Overexposure/stimulation as a means of advertising, co-opted with combining social media with advertising to a startling degree is the true culprit behind what you're seeing, and as a captive audience, like the prisoners in Plato's cave, you are unable to look away...
After a while, It turned out that none of these mattered. And I am back to paper books..
And btw, by and large, this happens to every feeling, not just excitement from technological innovation.
I know a lot of people have a troubled relationship to their phone, but this is really surprising to me. Would I want to go back to a world where I can't conveniently contact people, navigate the world, look up anything I want to know in an second, and set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer? Not even a little bit.
The last time I personally felt the excitement the author describes was probably with the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, but unfortunately that product went nowhere.
All other apps work though.
Best of both worlds.
I know it's mainly in jest, but this always strikes me as an odd example of 'high tech'. It feels like a 'first you create the universe' solution to using an egg timer with doughy fingers. Egg timers are simple devices that clean easy and can handle dough transfer. They are (or perhaps only 'were ') built as fit for purpose.
Yes, it's just an extra thing the 'high tech' can do, but damn it's an awful example of the (reached) potential of high tech.
A better example could be:
I can ask the air to buy me a big mac and have it paid for and delivered to my house within 30 minutes all while I'm changing a nappy and putting the baby to bed. There's a whole stack of systems needing to communicate to make that thing happen.
Self-driving cars are an additive technology, and there is certainly a place for them, but they should be at best (like all cars) your 3rd or maybe even 4th best option for daily activities.
Poor driving isn't limited to drunks or boomers.
Your comment just made me think about the whole self-driving car thing as an extension of the car-centric thinking of the US (and how car-centricity is essentially anti-social, but that's beside the point), and now even the US is losing the car race to China, but it will maintain it's car-centric philosophy based on momentum rather than practicality. Could public transport be a national security priority? (mostly tongue in cheek, but just a smidge not).
If your goal is to increase autonomy [1], wealth, entrepreneurship, and happiness and decrease death and health concerns, racism, obesity, and other things you need to move away from car-only building and design patterns. I also think busses are a problem because they just reinforce bad habits. For most municipalities a bus is just a worse version of your car which is why they're largely unsuccessful for the masses. Bike/walk/rail is, in my view, quite literally the only good path forward for future transportation development.
I don't think the US is losing the car race to China though. What race? Why are we even in a race all of a sudden? I drive an EV and like them but aside from emissions I'm not sure one is really all that better than another (I find EVs more convenient though).
[1] Been a bad person lately? Maybe the government and the vehicle facial recognition technology says sorry no driving for you. Now what? Secondarily for the elderly (as the single-issue voter OP has mentioned) walking/biking/rail allows for better outcomes and for folks to participate more in daily life. Driving becomes more and more hazardous as we age and folks wind up stuck at home.
* Putting down the throttle of my first BEV was magic (a rented ID3 Pro rented, it's not even performing like mad, but RWD gets it done). I laughed manically and in tears until arriving at home. Even laid back acceleration is still fun. ICE cars have become boring to me.
* The first time generating a longer working script with ChatGPT in its early incarnation was great! Correcting a broken web app by a junior dev with the help of Claude and ChatGPT was also crazy the first time.
* Letting the drone of my brother in law start and land from my hand, making incredible camera moves by pushing a few buttons was surreal.
* Hearing the first sounds of my mobile with Dolby Atmos was also like hallucinating. These tiny speakers have become unbelievable good for media consumption.
* Playing a recent e-piano that even mimics damper and co-vibrating strings. The improvements in tactile and acoustic experience are subtle but great
* I cannot wait to test a tone3000 neural amp modeling thingy -- the first time I heard a Kemper and tested even the basic Pod Go was also great.
* First picture of a laser projector: blown away. Next level of sharp picture.
...
So, I don't know what you're talking about.
It's still exciting (and has always been) for the young'uns.
every era brought something truly novel to the table. but then something changed mid 2010s. and it's not entirely megacorps' fault. it's also us customers. we didn't want to pay. and thus the business model that promotes enshittified services were born and now we have to live with it.
There's some sort of disease outbreak that turns people into zombies and society starts to collapse. Eventually things like the power grid and water/sewage infrastructure break down. Food rots. Gasoline runs out. It's basically guaranteed that you and your teammates will die in this game.
Even after living through a pandemic and all of the shit that came with it, and despite the grim atmosphere of the game, I still miss the time period that this game symbolized. I know I was only a child during the 90s and the era had its real problems, but there were good things about it and the state of technology at the time that have gotten worse in the decades since.
It was a time when media was a physical good and had meaning, when there wasn't a constant deluge of information, when my attention was less valuable than advertisers have made it today, and there was, at least for the majority of society, a shared informational reality.
That's all gone and there are massively powerful interests working to make sure it stays gone.
While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.
Had I known I were going to be getting rid of my car, an e-bike would have definitely been a better value. I feel lucky that things worked out the way that they did though - having both an e-scooter and an acoustic bike has been great!
To those people I wish a slow and painful death.
Think about all the fun wifi, zigbee, matter devices that you can play with (if you are inclined).
Meshtastic and LoRa is a great toy to play with.
The kitchen is full of interesting things, Sous Vide is great, the air fryer is... interesting and useful.
Lots of people love their robot vacuum
LED strip lighting has gone from nerdy to high design and has interesting features now.
Those "VCR" and "iPhone" moments are rare. There is a lot of practical innovations that make my life better and I would be hard pressed to give up.
Those kitchen advances never feel like advances to me though. Maybe I'm over simplifying it, but I'm tired of "needing" yet another box that gets hot. I am pretty sure an air fryer is just a small convection oven.
You can take my panini press from my cold dead hands though.
I used to read sci fi for the wonder, but now I read it with dread, for Chekov's Gun is a Torment Nexus, and if you introduce a Torment Nexus in Act 1 of a sci fi dystopia, it will be fired IRL by act 3.
Deeper lurks a more chilling question: what, on a dying planet run by fascists, should I do with my time?
How accurate did the endless news reports about your generation feel when you were young?