Luddism

Let me express some of the luddist thoughts that keep cycling through my mind.

Hurry Up

Technology was supposed to save us so much time, but we're still living in a hurry. It's like when you spend more to save more, and you end up with no money left. But I guess people will tend to find things to do with any time they happen to save, and they'll be back to square one, but it seems maybe to be worse than that. People seem more rushed than ever.

Computers were supposed to save time, but I spend a significant amount of my life waiting for the computer. I wait for it to boot, wait for it to load poorly designed pages, wait for downloads to finish, wait for the text editor to open, etc.

Stagnation

We were supposed to have robots doing all the work by now, making it possible for humanity to have more time to explore interests and expand minds. Technology seems stagnant. Where is the real progress? Things just become smaller and smaller gradually over time, but there is less fundamental change in the way things are made. It seems that most of our revolutionary inventions are in the past.

In the 1800s, there was an inventor under every rock. You even had farmers out in the sticks coming up with inventions. Now, people just watch TV and post jokes on Facebook.

Our "inventions" nowadays consist of drugs that are designed to solve one health problem while sabotaging other parts of your biology, ways to put more pesticides in our food supply through genetic engineering, and stupid crap like that.

False Hope

Technology has been a disappointing false hope. We were supposed to have a lunar colony and a base on Mars by now. We were promised flying cars. Robot slaves were going to be doing all the hard work. Yet some people continue to talk about all the amazing technologies that we'll have in just another ten or twenty years, and other people continue to believe it. It's always just another ten years or so that we'll have some awesome new stuff that will revolutionize everything. It's the same old story for 60 or 70 years, maybe longer if you were a fan of early science fiction. Actual progress is always right around the corner, but we never get there, do we?

Internet

The internet was supposed to be liberating. Do you feel liberated yet? That was just the lie they used to sell it to us. The creeps running the show would never have let the internet become popular unless they felt they could control it, and what do we have today but a few crooked, controlling megacorporations like Google and Facebook mostly running the web and shaping public opinion, policing what you can see and say online. Good luck even finding a normal website like this one anymore.

Progress

In the good decent old days, things would generally work instantly. Now you have to wait at least a second or two for everything. In the old days, even the cheap TV tuners used to come on instantly. Now, they have to boot up - even turning something on or off these days is annoying. How long do I need to hold down the power button?

In the old days, things would generally work right all the time. These days, all the bugs mean you never know what could happen. You could press up, and the channel goes down, or something worse. I had a TV tuner or two that would occasionally just forget channels randomly while changing channels. I bought three or four different brands of TV tuners before I gave up on TV altogether, and they all apparently had the same buggy chips.

Reliability

Some modern parts such as electrolytic capacitors are made so cheaply that they are only expected to last a few years. That's fine because people will just buy more junk when their current junk fails.

Waste

We're using up the Earth's finite resources so people can buy TVs and computers so they can watch obnoxious ads, watch propaganda designed to shape their minds to be proper idiots, watch disgusting music videos by talentless artists, and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. How will we colonize other planets after we've used up many of the resources of this planet will bullshit? We're slowly dooming ourselves to extinction, and that might be a good thing.

Haha

I'm a great programmer and webmaster, but I've teased one or two of my clients about their webmaster being a luddite. They probably didn't appreciate my humor much, but they had other issues.

AI

I sometimes use AI when Google is no help, which is increasingly common these days, but I feel that AI is generally overrated. I've tried to get AI to write articles for my websites, but it talks about things that don't exist. I've tried to get AI to generate art for my websites and social media posts, but the results are almost all unusable. I think my command of the English language is adequate, and I can give clear and unambiguous instructions, but the AI is just too stupid.

It's good for some things, just not many, and I'm sure it has potential, but I wouldn't worry about it taking over the world anytime soon. AI really stands for artificial idiocy.