In terms of human existence tech is overwhelmingly above the average person need. It's not providing anything beside more addictive paths. You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm.
ps: to add a bit more, from the few chats I have, people are either saying "well I need that to check my bank account or pay taxes" or "well I need that so I can binge on netflix"
Fair point but there are a few factors: that tool is having a lot of side effects, it went from a mysterious side piece of your life to a central addictive plane. I can't think of any tech that backfired that much. Your computer is underutilized, and its capacity is often above its users intellectually. We never had tools of that kind before, and I'm not sure people will feel the need for more. I personally am completely off the market.
> People have been saying this about technology for as long as technology has
existed.
Have they? It kinda sounds "truthy" but if ever there was an
unfalsifiable claim that's gotta be a contender.
I'm no general historian but think for the most-part people have
enthused over and coveted technologies for thousands of years.
With the exception of occasional religious objections to "magic" it
was the Luddites during the industrial revolution whose first
stirrings of discontent emerged.
Even the early critical science-fiction of H.G Wells and Mary Shelley
was tepid and poetic.
Much later, in the late 1960s, comes the first modern tech-critique,
and much of that is driven by affairs relating to environmental and
war problems, Vietnam, oil crisis, DDT... way before the Internet.
The idea that we have a surfeit of technological capability, or perhaps
just too much of the wrong type, seems very contemporary to me.
> You don't need more resolution, more bandwidth, more anything.. you probably need less, or more space to reflect and live outside the networked digital realm.
Better tech is how humans (all of them - rather than the few) get more space to reflect and live outside.
As always, it is a question of degree. A young adult in the 70s had plenty of time to reflect and live outside. The technology of the preceding 50 years has not made this more accessible. If anything, the slot-machine nature of our computing reduces the likelihood of it.
> A young adult in the 70s had plenty of time to reflect and live outside.
A young adult "in an already developed country with relatively new infrastructure that had already been built for them and they chose not to continue to invest in and improve" in the 70s had plenty of time to reflect and live outside.
Meanwhile, because of those young adults lack of productivity in the 70s, people even in the US are drinking water with lead, have their homes destroyed by climate change, had the forests die and passively watched as desertification took hold.
That said, I don't blame those young adults individually, they were a product of poor societal leadership. While not in aggregate (as evident in today's "crumbling" US and European infrastructure and diminished infrastructural head-start), I'm also sure many of these individuals found a healthy balance between being outdoors relaxing and improving the human condition for the long run.
All I'm calling out is that in aggregate they were no bastions you should hold in any high regard, and definitely not something to try and replicate.
What we need is better technology to lift up the human condition, allow each of us to continue to help improve the human condition with roughly 40 hours per year of effort, and spend the rest outdoors/gaming/enjoying/relaxing in general.
Bookmarks and data filtering are intermediate technologies that help make more technologies (they are necessary, but useless in and of themselves). When I say better tech, I mean:
- Less human effort and overall cost to produce and store food.
- Less human effort and overall cost to grow, transport, and store food.
- Less human effort and overall cost to clean, transport, and store potable water.
- Less human effort and overall cost to keep everyone's bodies healthy.
- Less human effort and overall cost to keep everyone's minds healthy.
- Less human effort and overall cost to construct net-new housing (and frankly more generally "improve everyone's safety").
- Less human effort and overall cost to keep our planet healthy i.e. appropriately and continually terraformed for our needs.
- Less human effort and overall cost to travel/explore any and every inch of this planet (including the sea floor, the highest mountains, the sky, and even orbit). Fuck it, why think small, even less human effort and overall cost to travel/explore every inch of this universe.
These are the technologies we need to get more people outdoors!
ps: to add a bit more, from the few chats I have, people are either saying "well I need that to check my bank account or pay taxes" or "well I need that so I can binge on netflix"