this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
72 points (96.2% liked)
Technology
73331 readers
4478 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
We don't notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I've never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.
AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren't technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.
And when they quietly solve a problem, we often expand their use until they start creating new problems. The automobile solved the problem of horses in cities (which were yes, a really terrible thing, between their excrement, their smell, the bodies of the ones driven to death, just horrible). But then we re-designed our whole metro-areas to put people at least 10km away from workplaces, groceries and services. The sprawl made the car necessary for parts of life that were never serviced by horses, and then you have terrible traffic and all the downsides that come with it. My point? The car did actually quietly solve a problem quite elegantly at first.