We used to be excited about technology. what happened?

I blinked at the poor aesthetics of Meta’s latest pitch for Horizon Worlds VR game. Painted walls of an abandoned nursery.” I sighed softly at the news. ring nation, an Amazon-produced television show featuring “lighthearted viral content” captured from the ring surveillance empire.I was clenching my chin in the screenshot A model of Stable Diffusion’s text-to-image model that provides AI artwork in the style of dozens of unpaid human artists.

Shannon Valor via Twitter

I got nervous.The initial dopamine reward for virality gave way to deeper sadness as my notifications began to explode and thousands of replies and retweets began pouring in. many The number of people sitting with a heavy stomach in the same way.

Still, there was catharsis in reading, so many others voiced it.

Something is missing in our lives and technology. Its absence fuels the growing anxiety expressed by many people working in the technology industry or studying technology. That is what drives the new generation of PhDs and postdocs I work with at the University of Edinburgh. They are gathering knowledge from the technical arts, sciences, and humanities to try to understand what went wrong in our tech ecosystem and how it went wrong. to correct. To do that, we need to understand how and why that ecosystem’s priorities have changed.

The goal of consumer technology development in the past was very simple. It was about designing and building something of value to people and giving them a reason to buy it. Your new fridge is shiny, saves on your energy bills, and makes ice cubes that look great. So i buy it.end. Roomba promises to vacuum cat hair from under the couch while I nap. sold out! But this vision of technology is becoming increasingly outdated. Refrigeration alone is not enough to keep food cold. Today’s version has cameras and sensors that can monitor how and what I eat. Also, Roomba is now able to send a map of my house to Amazon.

The issue here goes far beyond the obvious privacy risks. This is a big shift in the whole model of innovation and the incentives that drive it. Why settle for a single profit-taking deal for your company when you can design a product that extracts a monetizable data stream from every buyer and returns revenue to your company over the years? Huh? Once you capture that data stream, you protect it, but it can also hurt your customers. After all, buy enough of the market and you’ll have plenty of room to endure the anger and frustration of your customers. Just ask Mark Zuckerberg.

Consumer technology and social media platforms aren’t the only ones driving this shift. For example, John Deere, a formerly customer-favorite large agricultural technology brand, is being promoted by farmers who are upset that they are forbidden to fix their own machinery. fighting the ‘rights’ movement. Returns data about the farmer’s land and crops to the manufacturer.As multiple commenters on my Twitter thread pointed out, today’s technology we It’s the product, not the primary beneficiary. Machinery that was once a product is increasingly just a middleman.

We are also seeing a shift in the audience for today’s innovation.. Several respondents disagreed with my thread by drawing attention to today’s vibrant market of new tech for “geeks” and “geeks” such as the Raspberry Pi, open source software tools and programmable robots. Did. Many of these are great for those with the time, skill, and interest in using them, but they are tools made for a limited audience. Similarly, the thrill of seeing real innovation in biomedical technologies such as mRNA vaccines is to see the benefits concentrated in the wealthiest countries (those already best served by the technology). Let cool.