alt Hacker NewsI can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life, at least not without large downsides. There's some embedded stuff, like lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car, that I like, but the package as a whole... not really much of an improvement.
It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users.
People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
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> lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car
The hilarious thing is that the EU decided that the assisting must be mandatory, and so now every time you turn on your 2024 or newer car, lane assist and "you're speeding!" warnings are turned on.
At least there's still a way to turn them off/getting in the car means sit down, seat belt, mirrors, turn on the engine, go to settings and switch off the nanny modes...
This is it.
The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.
Plus the monopolies..
Yeah, this.
In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999.
Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane.
There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us.
The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family.
Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.
All you said plus they think they are above the law.
It's one of those things were I feel like a frog in boiling water. Drivers need smart assists in cars because I see everybody is checking messages and scrolling on their devices while driving. The tech is solving things but also creating a need for more tech to solve new problems. A lot of things also remain unsolved from the earlier stages of tech. Eg. what happens to our digital lives when we die, can we have legal access so it doesn't rely solely on personal responsibility to share account keys and passwords. How is our digital life secured and backed up without having to come up with home grown solutions and be a sys admin or pay for cloud storage. Why can't we decide on standard protocols for messaging, we had SMS, now we have different messaging apps, people who aren't tech savvy lose years of correspondence when switching devices because they failed to import or transfer data. We still haven't solved data archiving to free us from bit rot and degradation, things like project silica are only in the research phases. All the while, we generate more and more data and make our lives completely dependent on digital services and devices. More and more bank branches are cashless now. We had a massive power grid outage a few years ago and at the convenience store we couldn't buy anything, there was no way to issue a paper receipt or anything like that, the store employees were clueless. I still remember a time when you could buy on tab/credit, they would just write it up, or at least take cache and issue handwritten receipts. And now we're piling AI on top of everything, but operating systems are still crap, software is mostly crap and we have to update our devices every few years because they become slow or stop working. And it feels like younger generations don't mind because it's the new normal, they grew up with smart devices.