Smart cars, smart watches, smart TV, smart home. It seems companies are trying desperately to package their innovations as improvements… even though it seems as if their products are actually getting worse.
Take a look at your favorite social media platform. It’s more than likely they’ve implemented some sort of AI feature. Instagram, Snapchat, even Google seems to have been overcome by an AI-Apocalypse. Now, I want you to ask yourself: when’s the last time you actually used these features?
Personally, it brings me an immense amount of annoyance when these AI features are shoved in my face. Especially when it comes to platforms I use often, like Google. The ‘AI overview’ feature they’ve implemented is not only annoying, but is also incredibly dangerous. They’ve fixed it now, but previously if you looked up ‘how many rocks should I eat a day?’ Their AI overview would tell you to eat at least ‘one small rock’ per day. It’s funny at first, but if someone actually listened to this it could be detrimental to their health. AI isn’t entirely bad. The truth is, it’s just not that advanced yet. Companies are eager to roll out AI features, without considering the usability of them. AI ‘assistants’ litter every site, but I bet many of them go virtually unused. If it’s only crowding their sites and frustrating users, why do they continue to implement these features?
The short answer? Money. Companies run off stocks and shareholders. If the shareholders of a company are not impressed, people will no longer invest. In order to keep that money, companies tend to rush to ‘get ahead’ from competitors. Even if it upsets their actual consumers, it’s the shareholders’ money that they mainly care about. These new ‘AI’ features are simply for show or to impress shareholders, to make their product seem more appealing to the people behind the scenes. Profit is the motivation behind most technological ‘innovations’ in recent era. If a company fails to make more profit than the year prior–or they aren’t implementing AI features, investors might not be interested in continuing to invest in that company any longer.
The newest Apple iPhone, and some current phones have a feature utilizing language AI models. You can type in a brief sentence, and get it ‘expanded’ / written better by AI. While this can be useful, cell phone companies have also introduced features to summarize large bodies of text. So, if you were to send a brief sentence to a friend, then you enhance it with AI (making it a paragraph), they can just summarize the AI response–reducing it back into the brief sentence you wrote earlier. So, customers are essentially spending a lot of money for a product that adds more pointless steps to something–and uses a lot of natural resources in the process.
It’s not just internet innovation that is getting increasingly worse. It’s also cars. According to a JD Power study for 2022 vehicles, the number of problems owners have had was the worst they’ve seen since 2009. Cars are becoming increasingly dependent on screens in the middle of the car. While it might seem sleek and expensive, it’s actually much cheaper to produce cars entirely reliant on screens. Building a car with a bunch of different buttons or levers is much more expensive than simply inserting a screen. Another issue–if your car is reliant on a screen to work, if the screen gets broken then you can no longer use your car.
Another bad technology innovation, while this one isn’t recent–is streaming services.
Netflix was created mainly as a response to cable television. It was getting too expensive to pay for a bunch of different cable companies, so instead why not have one site where ALL the movies are? After Netflix created their streaming service, a bunch of new ones popped up. Fast forward 20 years and we’ve essentially created the same problem all over again. Now, if I want to watch Family Guy, Bojack Horseman, and The Office, I have to pay for three different streaming services. Consequently, some Americans are carrying so many different subscriptions, they don’t even know what they’re paying for. This is NOT an improvement from the old days of cable television.
The last technological innovation I want to talk about is crypto. While there are valid forms of cryptocurrency like Bitcoin– there are a lot of fake crypto scams that people frequently fall for. One example of the evil of cryptocurrency is the story of Sam Bankman-Fried. He managed to convince a lot of people that he was more qualified than he actually was. This led to millions getting scammed after they invested into his cryptocurrency, which completely crashed afterward. (They essentially paid for online currency, but the online currency’s value dropped so much that it wasn’t worth anything anymore). Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t the only one doing it either. Even Trump released a cryptocoin which is currently down by -51.13%.
One reason technology has slowed down is because a lot of the ‘low hanging fruit’ has already been picked. Now there’s pressure to perform, and a lot of the innovations that are coming out are extremely over-hyped. For example–the Tesla Robots that everyone was freaking out over? Turns out they weren’t actually robots, but were instead controlled remotely. In the tech world, the current strategy to keep stockholders money is to fake innovation. Lie about being able to do something crazy, (Make robots, make a self-driving car, etc) then produce something that seems to be impressive (even if it’s actually not). Then when the project is halted, simply move onto the next thing.
