I think there is a more interesting point made by the essay than "digital echoes," which are pretty abstract in comparison to day-to-day distractions that tangibly reduces time.
It's that there's a notion of a device that has so many features that it becomes "too useful." There is only so much time you can devote to so many features. Yet it's clear, for example observing the uptick in sci-fi computer interfaces in movies and such at the time, that crossing a threshold of "enough features" at once was useful at a certain point - having a pocket-sized Internet-capable device with a small-format camera that didn't suck for one thing.
There was also the essay posted recently that argued for a macOS release focused on bugfixes and stability over the disruption of new features with accompanying issues.
I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't have? Has that point already passed? I remember some iDevice releases weren't as notable upgrades as their predecessors for example.
In my opinion, if the AI revolution hadn't happened exactly when it did a couple years ago, this problem of diminishing tech returns would have been much more obvious than it is already. In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.
> In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.
We’ve been running on the remnants of research from the 50s - 70s for awhile now. Businesses have slow rolled the tech as long as they could, but the truth is, we’re at the end of the research that’s been accomplished. Given that and the exodus of researchers to go do things like optimize ads, I think the tech landscape will be fairly flat for the foreseeable future. Humans sailed for thousands of years before the steamship was realized. Our level of advancement over the past 100 years has been impressive, and there’s a lot we can do with it, if we don’t wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be humanity’s current limit for the foreseeable future. I believe the next big breakthrough that is needed to realize a technical breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value education, research, and stop fighting with one another over every single thing that exists. Whatever form of society that looks like, will be when humanity finally breaks free of its limits.
>...if we don’t wipe ourselves out, but I expect this to be humanity’s current limit for the foreseeable future. I believe the next big breakthrough that is needed to realize a technical breakthrough is a societal one. We need to value education, research, and stop fighting with one another over every single thing that exists. Whatever form of society that looks like, will be when humanity finally breaks free of its limits.
What mechanism is capable of driving such a societal paradigm shift? It seems so abundantly obvious to so many rational, intelligent, informed people that one is desperately needed, yet it's seemingly impossible to imagine how we could possibly achieve it before the current global system of systems undergoes a full or partial collapse? The acceleration toward cascading failure leaves little time even to figure out how to slow everything down, constrain the powers that be, and begin to repair, let alone time enough to actually make it happen. From what I've observed, the Cassandras warning of the clear dangers of our trajectory have mostly resigned themselves to hoping they survive whatever cataclysm first befalls us and rebuild afterward. This seems ill-advised when the accelerationist elites hope for the same thing and are planning and preparing far more insidiously.
I feel like we're living in an era of mass derealization. As consensus reality crumbles into post-truth, we collectively disregard the sheer unfathomable risk we are taking by, on a planetary and historical level, moving fast and breaking things in prod with no version control. There is no planet B.
We are ready to leave behind the fantasy gods and turn our worship toward the very real molecule that defines us and everything alive around us, and to the unbroken cord of being that links each of us so improbably to the first creature in the primordial ooze.
In the past, it was belief. Belief in there being more to this world.
In the future, it will be the same. Cultures cycle.
Our magic bullet this time around is AI.
The possibility for it to create a unifying belief system that's like an infinite venn diagram of all the best parts of past, present, and future religions - and people are free to pick and choose.
I think the writing's been on the wall for a while. This is why so much software is taking the 'as a service' route. You simply can't rely on customers buying the next version of your software because any new features are de minimus.
>I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't have?
I think we've passed that point a while ago. 4K is a smidgen beyond what most eyes can resolve, the smartphone has not seen the revolutions the early years did for a long time (since iPhone X I guess?), VR did not bring the Metaverse, NFT's flopped. I suppose the cloud was a shift in how we do things though.
Before I read your last paragraph I thought you were going to comment on how AI was not the revolution that was promised. There's some use cases and it's amazing that the tech works as well as it does, but I just don't see the mass adoption in the numbers or around me at all.
I used to be wide-eyed and excited for tech. I was an early adopter of all manner of gadgets from the Palm Pilot to the iPad, but the phenomenon described in the article as well as enshittification and the constant hype trains have disillusioned me. I buy a phone because it does everything I need to do life admin and it takes nice pictures, but like the article describes I wish it wasn't a data mine and an attention draining rectangle. I feel like there's more people at work trying to drain my brain and my wallet than building cool tech.
Back when not everything was connected to everything else by default all the time, the avenues for stealing my attention just weren't there and selling me a gadget had to be done on its merits. Maybe that's why innovation in the sense of utility is down and out.
It's that there's a notion of a device that has so many features that it becomes "too useful." There is only so much time you can devote to so many features. Yet it's clear, for example observing the uptick in sci-fi computer interfaces in movies and such at the time, that crossing a threshold of "enough features" at once was useful at a certain point - having a pocket-sized Internet-capable device with a small-format camera that didn't suck for one thing.
There was also the essay posted recently that argued for a macOS release focused on bugfixes and stability over the disruption of new features with accompanying issues.
I've been wondering for a long time now, at what point will so much innovation have already happened since the 90s-00s that there won't be enough actually useful features to tack on to the next release of X thing except ones that solve problems we didn't have? Has that point already passed? I remember some iDevice releases weren't as notable upgrades as their predecessors for example.
In my opinion, if the AI revolution hadn't happened exactly when it did a couple years ago, this problem of diminishing tech returns would have been much more obvious than it is already. In fact, I think the current LLM rampage of sorts acted as a flood to fill the drought of incremental innovation that would have otherwise occurred.