Tech, You Never Asked
I’ve given up waiting.
So I was thinking about AI, and I had a thought. [There’s something circular about that sentence, but I’m human, so I’ll let it go without underlining it.]
Technology doesn’t work because it’s sophisticated, clever, artificially intelligent or just better at stuff than we are. It doesn’t work because some clever person has had a clever idea and raised the finance to sell it to us.
Technology works — technology only works — technology only ever works — because it offers something we want it to do. We do want the best possible analysis of medical data, so we want technology — AI — for that.
We do want our pizzas to arrive on time, so — Deliveroo. We do want cheap rooms without the faff of hotels, so — AirB&B.
[With tech, we only ever re-invent what we can already do, have you noticed? So much for innovation.]
Tech’s also tricky. It works in ways that its creators don’t expect. Famous example: texting was intended for emergencies only — but then we all started texting each other. So — messaging.
What does that tell us?
That we know better than the people making the tech?
That’s exactly what it tells us. [We’re the users. So we’re the innovators. See above re messaging.]
Tech fails — tech always fails — when we don’t just naturally pick it up and find it useful. No matter how big the marketing budget. No matter how convincing the presentation to the venture-capitalists.
On my WhatsApp now is a small blue circle. It’s AI, I think. I open up WhatsApp, read my messages, reply to my messages, and close WhatsApp. The small blue circle stays in its corner.
When I click to reply to an email on my tablet now, a box appears next to the cursor. Help me write, it says. I start writing, and it goes away.
Tech’s becoming more intrusive. Guys — that’s not the same as becoming more useful. [Think: desperation? They need users but we don’t need blue circles?]
Anyway, for me, tech has come full circle.
I remember sitting in an office, back in the day, pasting galley proofs onto layout sheets, my typewriter pushed to one side, a newly delivered Apple Mac right in front of me. I couldn’t use the Apple Mac, for writing or laying out pages, because I hadn’t been trained on it yet.
These days, I sit at my desk, my laptop right in front of me, and scribble ideas and stories into a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook. I can’t use the laptop, for scribbling down ideas that sometimes develop into stories, because I’m still waiting for it to boot up. [It’s not slow, but it’s slower than inspiration.]
I think of all that money [already] spent on AI. I think of all the stories I’ve seen just recently that reference the dot-com boom — and the one that went so far as to predict the Butlerian Jihad. [While I’m at it, I also think of the sunk-cost fallacy.]
Then I go back to a thought I’ve had before, which is that the tech industry has never, not once, not ever — asked me what I want from it.
I could have been an innovator. But now I’m back on paper.
Technology only ever works when it does something that we can recognise as useful. When it does something that we can recognise.
This is why we get self driving cars — oh, right, cars — and not, I don’t know, personal levitation devices to fly us along (and off) the roads with, yeah, let’s say bat-signal functionality to save us from bumping into things.
This is why technology never truly innovates.
