Should We Decouple Technology from Everyday Life?(thepublicdiscourse.com) |
Should We Decouple Technology from Everyday Life?(thepublicdiscourse.com) |
It looked nice, stainless steel, big (probably 2 liters). When I unwrapped it, I saw a QR code that said "Instructions." Weird, why would I need instructions for a water bottle? Then I saw a large rubber plug in the bottom.
I realized with horror, it's a bluetooth enabled heating/cooling element controlled by an app I'm supposed to download. The heating element is huge, takes up half the volume of the bottle. So now this water bottle:
1. Needs power. 2. Needs an app. 3. Has less water capacity.
All so it can just do the same thing as a normal insulated bottle and some ice cubes.
Anyone who hasn't already experienced a good vacuum-insulated water bottle, you're in for a treat.
Warning: Normally, when you pour hot coffee or tea into a mug, it cools significantly within a minute. But put it in an insulated bottle for the first time, and it might surprise burn your tongue half an hour later. (Or maybe I was the only one who didn't anticipate this.)
> might surprise burn your tongue half an hour later.
We're so good at keeping liquids hot it's crazy. If you can't either drink your liquid in 10 hrs or get to a microwave within that time, you're looking for a pretty niche product and a self heating bottle isn't it.
A large vacuum bottle with ice cubes on a hot summers day is hard to beat too.
Maybe that's cool, if you're showing off how Old Money fills the hours of their do-nothing lives? Vs. if you have a job, a family, and often too-few hours in your busy days? NO. I don't travel in a horse-drawn coach paced by footmen, either.
People reheating coffee and tea should be put to jail
It's like someone looked at The Homer [1] and thought "that's solid engineering sensibility."
For example the smart phone. A physical button or even alexa is easier to turn off the lights. A smart phone menu is just stupid.
I want to decouple stupidity away from technology. That's not possible though. Most places where I worked... just a exploring the code for a couple minutes I encounter something stupid. So it's an impossible endeavor. Stupidity is intrinsic to humanity and since humanity builds technology, stupidity is therefore intrinsic to technology.
I'll give an example. At my university each term we do a "survey" to communicate what we want to teach. It has such brilliant questions as "for what academic year" that has a single option and "what you previously taught". There is no caching, so you answer these questions over and over.
Or how about every time I import a calendar I get a new copy of a holiday calendar and this doesn't automatically merge.
There's a million things like these that are small but take tons time and add frustration. They are small but they add up and combine. A million things that take 0.1s but you do every day will still take up your entire day. It just seems we get more and more of this while we're trying to make the next big thing but can never do when we think one quarter at a time
Im not going to live in an apartment that requires a smartphone to get into the door. That may involve me making sacrifices, I don't care. You have to draw a line somewhere. If parking somewhere requires an app, or eating at a restaurant requires a QR code, I'm just going to go somewhere else. I'm not going to chain myself to a smartphone just because society is addicted. Just like I didn't take up smoking back when everyone around me smoked. And when I do need to use my phone, I pick it up, use it for a purpose, and then put it down. No idle, passive scrolling allowed. No notifications. DND mode 24/7. It is not allowed to interrupt me with a call or a message. When I stop work, the phone goes in a drawer until tomorrow. When I go on vacation, the phone gets packed deep in the emergency baggie, or just not brought at all. This autonomy requires a little sacrifice, and stings a little if you're not used to it. But, ultimately I think it's better for my health, both physical and mental.
And my answer to that is: absolutely.
IANAL, but that sounds like some sort of lawsuit and/or PR disaster just waiting to happen.
When I work with Muslims I don't cook with pork for the office pot luck. When I cook with meat I always mark that on the dish so that vegetarians know not to eat it. (To my knowledge I've never worked with someone Jewish - but given some places where I've lived I think I have without knowing, while I have known about some Muslims I've worked with).
Link to research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27830946/
Link to full PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309898157_Seven-day...
Yes, I know remarkable and other products exist, but they really don’t act exactly like a notebook. You can’t flip through the pages or dog-ear them. You can’t just hand a reMarkable off to someone to borrow or keep, it’s a $700 investment that’s tied to your online accounts. It has a battery life, and you need to have WiFi around to sync.
In a truly perfect world I would just be able to lay my $5 paper notebook infused with nanobots or other such future magic onto a smart surface on my desk and my computer would automatically read the contents.
Obviously we are a long way off, if it’s even possible to make something like that practically, but that’s the kind of interfaces I think we should work towards - computing so efficient and subtle you don’t realize it’s digital.
I kind of hated the movie Her but I thought the scene where the main character is designing something by just sitting down at his desk and talking to the computer conversationally was really cool. We can probably get close-ish in the next 10 years with all this fancy AI.
This is how most people operate and prefer their products (Learned from years in the smarthome industry).
You can find simple products where all the controls are inexplicably moved into a phone and they’re generally not well liked. It makes sense for something that augments the phone (e.g. playing music through Sonos) but it doesn’t make sense when you have to use your phone to do things that should have been controls on the device. The latter group is universally despised and products like that never do well.
There’s a growing technology backlash where some people pretend like every smart device is dumb and useless, but they’re almost always fixated on that group of devices that doesn’t do well. They ignore the devices that people actually like because those would invalidate their stance that technology integrations are bad.
I wrote about this here.
Cars & appliances have regressed into unreliable, overstimulated and unpresonsive disasters. Much of this is how they are marketed and sold. Cars seem flashy until you own it for a few months .
It's up to consumers to make a choice.
The author argues for "a restoration of choice: a campaign to ensure analogue alternatives to digital tools."
If you had a viable choice besides a car (like a combination of mass transit, walking, and bike), would you choose it?
But of course most people in the US cannot make that choice because where they live was, over the last century, designed around cars, and often eliminated choices which were present.
Had those choices remained, there would be more pressure on car manufacturers to build better cars.
Consumers alone aren't going to transform cities into a walkable place.
It's too late for me to decouple technology from everyday life. Best go on without me. I wish you all luck.
That said, I think that there’s a lot to be said for choosing low-tech options. I have the overhead light in my living room controlled by a cheap $5 mechanical timer not unlike what was available when I was a kid in the 70s. It’s near an expensive high tech digital picture frame. I like going for the lowest tech option that’s feasible.
⸻
1. There’s some discussion of this subject in Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman which I won’t get into here.
How is publishing this on the internet at all hypocritical?
Is anyone currently being forced to use any technology?
Doomscrolling, like drug addiction, is largely the product of the holistic social-biological environment of the actor. People generally do not intentionally throw away stimulating, happy, healthy lives to become destitute drug addicts, and a comparison of opening a parking payment application to being offered alcohol seems hyperbolic.
Smartphones are in many ways materially superior to carrying stacks of paper, just as driving a car is usually materially superior to horse-drawn carriage. It is materially inappropriate to allow the Choice of horse-drawn carriage on the interstate highways. These technologies do require increased infrastructure and investment (that interstate), perhaps, but this is the way the human body itself is laid out: a network of interdependent, largely centralized organs. Compare to a simpler life form like a yeast. Less "infrastructure", but also less going on.
I do agree with some of the sentiment of the author. It is not very libertarian of me, but in my opinion, some increased top-down regulation of social networks might be necessary, i.e., KYC. The ability to hide behind aliases to publish whatever you want without any "skin in the game" seems to have decreased the level of coherence overall and permitted for neurotic anti-reality perspectives to proliferate. If government regulation of behavior and chemicals is appropriate, government regulation of garbage information probably is as well.
And if someone's giving you software where hardware belongs, ask what flexibility they're getting out of it.
> In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman discusses how poorly designed doors—often called "Norman doors"--fail to communicate whether they should be pushed or pulled. A well-designed door should naturally indicate how it operates through affordances (such as a push plate vs. a pull handle) and signifiers (like labels or arrows). This concept is part of a broader discussion on human-centered design and usability.
At a minimum, a poorly designed door can be opened!
Maybe AI will improve the situation in the next few years, but I'm not convinced.
Even if voice assistants worked perfectly every time they would still be worse than the switch by the door for controlling the light as you enter/leave. However if you are in bed it may be that despite the current annoyances Alexa is better for controlling the same light.
The phone app is just annoying by design.
> Hey Google, when's the last time I bought gas for my truck? What did I pay, and how many MPG did I get?
> Hey Siri, the other day at the bar, my friend was telling me about a TV show he recommended I watch. What was the name of the show again? What service streams it? Play the trailer on the living room TV.
Instead, they just harvest all the data, sell it to whoever they feel like, just so everyone can show me intrusive adds for shit I don't care about.
I'm not sure that's true. A physical button only works if I'm near that button. Alexa only works if I'm near a microphone (and comfortable with that microphone). Whereas my smartphone is always in my pocket, and therefore always useful.
That's not to say a button isn't also useful - it's usually more convenient if I'm already next to that button, which makes it great for turning room lights on and off if I'm moving from room to room. But if I'm on the sofa and I want to dim the lights without having to get up, the smartphone, for me, seems like the most practical choice.
I suspect what seems like stupidity to you may often be people catering to those with different desires and needs. Just because a smartphone isn't a useful way of controlling lights for you, doesn't mean that it's a stupid design decision for everyone.
Sure. Now how long does it take you? Take that phone out of your pocket, unlock it, open the lights app, skip past whatever update/ad/welcome screen, find the correct light button and press it. Anything on a smartphone takes substantially longer than a physical button.
Not to mention that the physical button tends to be more reliable at doing what it's supposed to. People still buy alarm clocks and then put their phone next to it at night.
It has nothing to do with me not being able to set it up. It more has to do with the stupidity of the user interface of pulling my phone out of my fucking pocket, navigating to the app, navigating to the menu and picking the lights and the color and flipping it.
You could try Simple X Mobile: https://sxmo.org/
These aren’t mutually exclusive.
I usually press the physical button for my lights but it’s great to be able to pull out my smartphone and turn off lights across the house, or even in the same room if I’m doing something like holding a baby who is falling asleep.
Putting the common light controls on easily accessible phone widget screens is really easy these days.
I think people who get irrationally angry at the ability to control things from a phone are missing out at this point. You don’t have to use it or buy it, but I’ve derived a lot of value from it.
> Stupidity is intrinsic to humanity and since humanity builds technology, stupidity is therefore intrinsic to technology
This is a deeply cynical and unhappy way to navigate life.
Like, one or two things really make me consider getting into the whole smart home stuff: Turning down the heating when windows are open. Or, controlling a couple of things when I'm not at home (aka my phone isn't on the local WIFI) - turn on the ambient light if it's late/dark and I'm at home, and turn it off otherwise. This would probably add phone controls to stuff, I guess. However, I would very much want these smart features to be "on top" of regular physical control.
But then there are also things like internet connected fridges, or cars playing ads. It'd be nice if my fridge could ping me if the internal temp is rising - though a loud obnoxious beep might work too, but it doesn't need to be internet capable to serve me ads.
And deeply true. Here’s the thing I feel a lot of people think happiness is all that matters. What about truth and reality?
My claim is that stupidity being intrinsic to humanity is fucking absolutely true. It has nothing to do with cynicism. I’m baffled at how people don’t even argue the veracity of the claim they just claim it’s “unhappy” as if being delusional is the better alternative.
> I think people who get irrationally angry at the ability to control things from a phone are missing out at this point. You don’t have to use it or buy it, but I’ve derived a lot of value from it.
I work at a place where there are no keys. To unlock a door you have to use your smart phone. Imagine if they did that for lights. I rent an apartment with no physical switches and they force you to use your smart phone. Infuriating. I think if you were rational you would know I’m talking about smart phones in place of physical switches not smart phones paired in addition to physical switches in situations where you have no choice to use it.
I always hated this kind of technology use. I love technology when it is used to do things that were not possible before or hard to accomplish. I hate QR codes, but even they can be handy at times (without the QR code I would have never encountered the DB ICE Portal for example).
The examples you brought up are small but ubiquitous enough to be extremely annoying. Instead of getting a few printed menus on the table, everybody on the table spends 10 minutes being glued to their phones, zooming and scrolling around to make sense of the offer and select something. Instead of just being able to pull a parking ticket at a meter I have to figure out which of the damn apps I have to use to pay for my parking. And with scammers almost always being smarter then the service providers, I now also have to make sure that I don't fall for "Quishing" scams [1] (honestly no clue if that is as thing elsewhere)
[1]: German: https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/digitale-welt/phis...
Great example, phones are absolutely terrible for navigating menus. I really struggle when I can’t have all of the info presented to me at once - I just get lost scrolling around and juggling options in my short term memory.
In response to your examples here:
> Im not going to live in an apartment that requires a smartphone to get into the door.
110% agreed. I think some kind of smart lock or maybe an RFID thing is just a door lock that is far more error-prone than it needs to be. No reason for it.
> If parking somewhere requires an app
These I can like. The problem is you inevitably run into the problem you always run into: a given app provider is almost certainly not your local municipality, and you have no idea which provider a given area will have chosen to accomplish this. If this could be standardized into one provider, operating as a utility, that simply works everywhere in the United States, that would be fucking brilliant. Just pull up to any public owned lot or stall, scan a QR code, select how long you're parking, and be auto-billed according to pre-set preferences.
But of course that's not the real experience. You have to download a new app for any given place, set it up with an account, another password you're almost certainly going to forget, give yet another nameless corporation your personal details and payment information and fuck knows how they're going to store them, and repeat this process wholesale the next time you have to park somewhere else. That's maddeningly stupid.
> eating at a restaurant requires a QR code
Perhaps controversial, I think this is okay. Especially if it's the type of restaurant where the menu frequently changes, I think this is honestly a good move. It saves a bunch of paper from being thrown out constantly and gives the staff one less thing to need to juggle as they seat patrons. And QR scanning and opening a web-link is essentially built-in functionality to any smart phone made in the last 5 years or so.
Now, if you scan a link and you need to download a fucking app... fuck that. Hard fuck that.
The parking I agree with, that solves a problem and genuinely makes our lives easier, but it should never be the only option for paying for parking.
That battle has been largely lost in my city.
Last year I had to attend a work related course. I'm running a little late, and I get to the place with just a few minutes to spare. Usually I can just tap my debit card and enter my license plate at the terminal, an operation that takes 15 seconds. But this parking garage was app-only. So I spend 15 minutes instead on this bullshit. The first app I tried wasn't supported on the old 1G iPhone SE I had at the time, because I guess parking technology is just too advanced for that neolithic device. Next app works, but of course I have to go through the whole rigmarole of making an account, confirming my email, adding my payment card and then confirming THAT, and so on and so forth. How is this any easier than the old method? My mom would never have figured this shit out. Not that she'd be able to park there anyway probably, because she's inherited my iPhone SE now.
I mean... it is pretty handy to just add more time from your phone instead of running out to the meter to feed more quarters in.
It’s true that people don’t intentionally become destitute drug addicts.
However, it’s completely false to claim that people wouldn’t get addicted to drugs if they had stimulating, happy lives.
A very common entry point to drug addiction in modern life is when people are having a great time in life, doing well enough to afford large amounts of drugs, and feeling invincible because so many things in their life are going their way. People willing experiment with drugs for fun, which can quickly turn into a habit and a cycle.
I don’t know where this myth comes from that drug addicts are a product of their environment, not their own actions. When one of my friends was in rehab (fully recovered now for many years, thankfully) one of their rules was that people had to accept responsibility for their choices and actions in getting involved with drugs. Apparently it was common for people and their families and friends to generate a lot of “not your fault” excuses to absolve them of any responsibility for getting involved with drugs: Blaming peer pressure, a breakup, a bad job, a tragedy. This made people temporarily feel less guilt, but it also allowed them to avoid addressing their own behaviors and actions. Their theory was that entirely externalizing the drug addiction and turning the patient into a 100% pure victim just opens the door to relapse when those circumstances happen again, because it teaches them that it’s not their fault and out of their control anyway.
Even taking this statement at face value, it's easy to point out how absurd it is.
A huge segment of opiod abusers started off with prescriptions. These were functional members of society and availability to dangerous substances absolutely led to bad outcomes. [1]
Or take another vice, gambling. Recently legalized pretty much everywhere, gambling help lines have seen a huge uptick in traffic [2]. It's only been a few years since sports betting has become mainstream, and already it's a drag on society.
But going beyond the face value of that statement, there's a deeper issue which is, huge segments of the population are not leading "stimulating, happy, healthy lives". There's a reason why purveyors of drugs, scams, cults, gambling tend to go after these demographics; people that are desperate for relief. Does that make it okay? Does it excuse the peddling of harmful wares? Because it sounds like you're saying it's fine to sell harm because these people should know better. I think that's a rotten way to live.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I think this line of thinking is wildly antisocial. It's absolutely the "fuck it, i just gotta get my bag" thinking that is ruining trust in our industry.
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/prescription-o... [2]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
Drug addiction is also a product of the availability of drugs.
China has much less problems with opioid overdose than America because they learned their lesson in the 19th century.
Technology should all the advantage of owning a personal slave without all human rights costs.
While I do agree with the need for regulation, I don't agree that anonymity is the issue. Today many/most people post under their real name on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X, and still that doesn't stop people from posting the most vile stuff that you'll ever read. In some sense I feel like that's worse, because if they did so under a synonym there would be some sense that they know that they comments are unacceptable. I honestly think we need more anonymity online.
Similarly, observant users may use artificial light, they just may not turn it on or off. So there are Sabbath lamps where the bulb remains lit but a shade can be lowered to block out the light.
Are these modern cheats to allow observant users to benefit from the convenience of technology while ignoring the tenets of their faith? I'm no reliogiologist, but if these are cheats, they are ancient ones, not modern ones. For example in past times, people would cook before the sabbath then leave the food on a warm hearth with insulation for later consumption.
Tesla does get a lot of little things right -- auto sensing for seat and steering wheel heating, auto-setting seats to your profile as you enter the car based on your phone, automatically setting/unsetting the emergency break when you park, auto locking the doors when you leave, etc. But its "thou shalt not have physical buttons" dogma is annoying. The other thing I miss is the absence of a HUD right in front of you. Again, feels like dogma rather than good design. Other brands (BMW, Polestar, etc.) succeed in that regard (my favorite being the BMW where it projects the HUD onto the bottom of the windshield right where it doesn't obstruct the view but is extremely convenient.
I don't dislike the Tesla but even if Elon wasn't going full fascist, I'd pick another brand next time.
In any case, stone tools are technology. Making fire requires technology.
I'll set aside people who need technology to live (clothes are technology, but so is a CPAP machine).
I'll set aside how places are increasingly going cash free (cash is technology, and credit cards are more advanced technology, and phone payment requires even more technology).
Take my gym. Last year they switched to QR phone entry. The QR code changes every few seconds, so you can't print out the code and take it in. The handful of people without a smartphone, like me, got an exception to use an RFID card.
However, those who have a smartphone were not allowed to use an RFID card, even those complaining at the front desk, angry because they did not want to bring their phone with them to the gym.
It's true they are not forced to go to the gym, though note that most other gyms around here have also switched to smartphone entry, and I chose this gym specifically because they are the only one offering a specific style of group training that I want.
Or, take some of the examples at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43137488 where people can't pay for parking because they need a smartphone app which requires not just iPhone/Android, but is only available from the local country's app store - rather difficult for foreign visitors.
It's true they are not forced to park there. They can find somewhere else and walk or take the bus.
Or, take the local college. They are a Microsoft shop. You need 2FA via smartphone app to log into their machines, access email, and the like. Signs and other info about upcoming events require a QR-code for info like time and place. People are not forced to use a smartphone, since they have a choice to not go to college, or find one of the decreasing number of schools which don't expect everyone to have a smartphone.
Or, a friend of mine lives in a city with no good mass transit options or bike options. Those who don't have a car use app-based taxi services. She knows a couple of people who choose to not have a smartphone, so they are limited to places they can walk.
In all cases there is still a choice, but it becomes increasingly Hobson's choice - and we've decided that living as a hermit, even metaphorically, is not what you mean by an alternative to not being forced, right?
To your points specifically, I mostly see that you are complaining about technology you were previously used to (RFID cards, parking payment systems, public transit, school management systems, etc.) being replaced by more advanced technology (QR codes, 2FA, etc.). So, I don't see the problem as decoupling technology from lives but as enabling a smoother transition to more reliable and advanced technology.
The article makes other points about addiction, etc., and this is a problem that is not innate to technology but to human behavior that is exploited (knowingly or unknowingly) by profit-driven companies. Targeting the technology itself in this situation, again, is being lazy in my opinion.
Most people don't have such a complex setup that this ever comes into play. However if you have a stage in your house (not a movie theater, a full stage) you would want that level of control. There are probably a few dozen such houses in the US.
This is the big problem with "smart" devices. They take an existing reliable solution to a problem (e.g., flicking a switch to turn on a light), sprinkle on some nice-to-have whiz-bang features (e.g., doing it from afar), but compromising the initial reliable solution in the process.
If those extra features were strictly optional and additive, then it wouldn't be a problem. But that's not how it works in practice.
It's not the right tradeoff for everyone or at all times (there's a good reason why physical switches are the default in most homes!) but it's a useful feature. It is by no means irrational, as the previous poster was suggesting: it was designed with a lot of rationality to suit a use-case that that poster may not have.
Rather less time than it takes you, apparently. My process is: pull phone from pocket, swipe down, tap button.
I don't need to unlock it as a discrete step because it did that automatically when it saw my face. I use the built-in smart-home management, so all the controls are available in the system-level control center widget -- which doesn't have any sort of junky updates / ads / welcomes.
It's certainly slower than pressing a physical button if I'm standing next to one. But it's genuinely faster than standing up and walking over to press said button.
But to your point - who creates this environment, or what incentives are there for creating a less antisocial environment? I don't think collective willpower exists; there are only incentives. The ball may be in our court as creators, but due to the prevailing incentives, we've chosen to use the ball to extract as much as we can from every little piece of everyone's life. And such a powerful tool allows for efficient extraction!
--everyone
And, worse case scenario, you spend like 5 minutes occasionally doing it and now have access to a clean microwave, without needing to buy more e-waste and encouraging the production of cheap, stupid things like a water bottle with a heater in it.
Alternatively, if you mention you cleaned it, they'd be more inclined to say that you're the one who cleans it.
You pass responsibility to someone who isn't responsible. You don't recognize this function repeats and people become over burdened. Sure "It's not a big deal" but that's in isolation. That's one time, one task. These things don't just add up, they compound
I don't think that's so rational — I assumed that you were talking about smartphones in addition to existing switches and other tools, rather than completely replacing them. I have genuinely never heard of such a thing, and if you've had to experience that, then I agree with you that that is an insane concept that doesn't need to exist.
Still, I get the impression that drugs are not a part of public life in China the way they are in America.
[1] http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/zggs/202406/t20240620_114...
The People's Republic of China dealt with addiction as a political problem, offering the new society hope, food, shelter, work, and land instead of opium. Addiction no longer had its appeal. Opium producing poppies were replaced by food corps. Large opium distributors were imprisoned. Addicts were "clean". A mass campaign against addiction mobilized the entire nation. Before Liberation in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had kept opium out of their areas. However, it took until 1953 to rid China completely of opium. Twenty million Chinese outside the People's Republic of China continue to have serious narcotic addiction problems.
At least make it subtle.
Home automation systems (Home assistant, openhab...) are making good progress on local only voice control as well.