< Some Brief Examples of the Unthinking Adoption of Technology (and a Solution?)
I think that there's a certain tragedy to how the technology boom/bust cycle works, really—there are legitimately cool ways to use AI, but it requires AI to suck at its job (like that AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti, or This Cat Does Not Exist). Smartphones are incredibly interesting devices, but thanks to companies like Apple being trendsetters, they've become massive, horrible slabs that barely fit in my pocket.
Joseph Weisenbaum had the right idea about computers being fundamentally conservative devices. Sure, computers can solve host a problems really well, but they prevent the need for new social inventions. Why attempt to find a better way to organize, say, a schedule when a computer can just solve an n-constraint Lagrange multiplier problem? Moreover, I've noticed that, at least within my own field of physics, there's a lot of people that like to fall back on sophisticated first-principles calculations rather than doing any real theoretical work—some people think that density functional theory calculations make the act of theorization secondary to plugging in the coordinates of atoms in a system. And that type of thinking—one built with the idea that the computer is superior for all problems, or eliminates the need for human work—is what gets the founder of Sun Microsystems to advocate for a "modern thinking" degree in place of English, History, and other various fields in the humanities.
We need technology that works *for* us, rather than against us.