What's Left for Tech?

So, there's another side of this, which is something that's also happened to cars and many homes. Construction materials and techniques have become good enough that it's greatly extended the life of so many items over the years, and by nature, technology.

I just finally switched to an iPhone Pro after years of Android based primarily on Apples switch to USB-C (finally!) and the titanium build (mocked in the OP). People complain about the 2-3 year Android upgrade cycle, but it's inexpensive and iterative. The iPhone 15 Pro line was the first I've seriously looked at where I've thought "I might be using that phone in 6 years and it will still look and work fine." I saw so many people throughout the '10s with messed-up looking iPhones waiting on their cell phone contracts to upgrade; I've always been a "buy an unlocked phone with cash and upgrade when it's not right" kind of guy.

I own two 10 year old cars. Both require almost no maintenance. When I was a kid, a 10 year old 100k mile car was a beater. Both of these cars look and work fine. I pay almost nothing for them, as they're both very fuel-efficient, and the cost of insuring a 10 year old car can be surprisingly low. In the 80s, a 10 year old 100k car would be considered a beater or a hand-me-down. Today, it's fine.

But still, it's difficult to come up with new developments that I think will radically recontextualize society as we've experienced. The digital T1 line was used for inter-city phone trunking in the '60s. We landed on the moon in 1969, and UNIX was born the same year. C was created in 1972. Ethernet and GPS were proposed in 1973, TCP was created in 1974. For those now middle-aged Gen-X people, it was always possible to see the potential future as children, as the frameworks had been developed before we were born. (Many of us did.)

But we're living in a new era of refinement and decay, as the life-changing things get incrementally better slowly, but while the confusion stemming from the continual growth of the last millennium receding ends up resulting in less opportunity, less wealth, and less excitement and hope.

The tech we encounter thrives mainly on hype and rapid turnover. Just as Wall Street thrives on hype and the "Boom, Bust and Bailout" cycle. (1)

As long as fast-talking entrepreneurs can bag large amounts of money on hype-based startups, not that there's anything wrong with that if they grow up and do something good, then we will IMO see 100 products with artificially induced "need" for every genuine blessing to mankind, such as improved medical care, and most of those will be for outrageous profits (2).

The only way, it seems to me, to channel technology into universal good is to have better people, in the sense of choosing to do better things with their lives than build empires, next year's "new and improved" auto or phone, or yet another tech -- scratch that --- advertising platform, (3) or WeChat clone. Oh, or computer assistant (AI) to replace real people (yuck, people)

It's always a choice. There are desperate needs for climate mitigation (since infinite growth and insane concentration of wealth are about to wreck the planet), disease treatment and prevention, or anything at all to help seniors, our "throw-away" people. Low tech is all that's needed in many cases, "but there's not enough money in it."

(1) After I typed this, I found that Ted Kaufman, successor to Joe Biden in the senate and who once oversaw the TARP program, delivered a speech with this same title.

https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/kaufman/home/22-months/fina...

(2) Bernie wants to know why pharmaceutical prices are so high.

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-chairman-...

(3) Jeff Hammerbacher story.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/why-this-tech-bubble-is-diff...