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This is not the future

• notpachet 10mo ago
  "Mortality as home entertainment -- this cannot be the future!! ...Can it??" - McCabe (Kurt Russell), Vanilla Sky
• gorgoiler 10mo ago
  I like the “wasn’t inevitable” list. The fact that two US corporations control 99% of phones is another one that feels about as comfortable as a rock in my boot and I hope this too is not inevitable, in the long run. Imagine if the 80s and 90s had been PC vs Mac but you had to go to IBM for one or more critical pieces of software or software distribution infrastructure. The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability didn’t happen overnight of course. I don’t think it will be (or ought to be) inevitable that phones remain opaque and locked down forever, but the day when freedom finally comes doesn’t really feel like it’s just around the corner. Posted, alas for now, from my iPhone
  • strix_varius 10mo ago
    Also imagine that basic interactions were mediated by those monopolies: you had to print your bus ticket personally with software only available on your IBM.
  • gwbas1c 10mo ago
    > The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability didn’t happen overnight of course. There's a recording of an interview with Bill Gates floating around where he pretty much takes credit for that. He claims (paraphrasing because I listened to it almost 20 years ago) that he suggested a lot of the hardware to IBM because he knew he could repurpose DOS for it.
    • gorgoiler 10mo ago
      I also phrased this badly. Cambrian explosions by definition happen in very short time frames (“overnight”), but the conditions required to set off the explosion take a long time to brew and are few and far between. We’re two decades into the smartphone era and my hope is that we’re still in the DEC / VAX / S370 stage, with the “IBM-PC” stage just around the corner still to come.
  • Tepix 10mo ago
    In particular it is very regrettable if we look at how Apple has treated the mobile safari browser.
  • layer8 10mo ago
    > The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability didn’t happen overnight of course. It happened because IBM by mistake allowed it to happen. Big tech companies nowadays are very proficient at not repeating those mistakes.
• nancyminusone 10mo ago
  >Garbage companies using refurbished plane engines to power their data centers is not inevitable Was wondering what the beef with this was until I realized author meant "companies that are garbage" and not "landfill operators using gas turbines to make power". The latter is something you probably would want.
  • Tepix 10mo ago
    I think he's referring to Boom and also to xAI.
    • pbmonster 10mo ago
      There's many more. Aeroderivative gas turbines are not exactly new, and they have shorter lead times than regular gas turbines right now, so everybody getting their hands on any has been willing to buy them.
• oblio 10mo ago
  After reading and watching things by quite a few historians, one of the points that sticks out is: most things in history were not inevitable. Someone had to do them and other people had to help them or at least not oppose them. A lot of history's turning points were much closer than we think.
  • gorgoiler 10mo ago
    What are your top examples of could’ve-beens or near-misses?
    • Zealotux 10mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
    • oblio 10mo ago
      There are a bunch, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_House_of_Brandenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_House_of_Brande... It had huge impact on world history: it indirectly lead to German unification, it possibly lead to both world wars in the form we know them, it probably impacted colonial wars and as a result the territory of many former colonies, and probably also not their current populations (by determining where colonists came from and how many of them). I'm fairly sure there were a few very close battles during the East India Company conquest of India, especially in the period when Robert Clive was in charge. Another one for Germany: after Wilhem I died at 90, his liberal son Frederick III died aged only 56, after a reign of just 99 days. So instead Germany had Wilhem II as the emperor, a conservative that wrecked all of Bismark's successful foreign policies. Oh, Japan attacking Pearl Harbor/the US. If the Japanese Army faction would have won the internal struggle and had tried to attack the Soviets again in 1941, the USSR would have probably been toast and the US would have probably intervened only slowly and indecisively. I can't really remember many others right now, but every country and every continent has had moments like these. A lot of them are sheer bad luck but a good chunk are just miscalculation. History is full of what-ifs, a lot of them with huge implications for the world.
• ekianjo 10mo ago
  > The Apple Vision pro was not inevitable I don't get the reason for this one being in the list. Is that an abusive product in some way?
  • yunohn 10mo ago
    I think AR/VR definitely turns off a lot of people, me included. Further it is seen as anti-social and unnecessary to many. I think the lackluster sales prove the “not inevitable” point.
    • ekianjo 10mo ago
      Why single out the Apple Vision Pro and not the Meta Quest?
      • actionfromafar 10mo ago
        Don't know, but, several times now, a product category was not universal until Apple "invented" it. Haha, only serious.
    • the_gastropod 10mo ago
      I don't necessarily disagree with the crux of your point. But I suspect the lackluster sales also had something to do with the $3,500 price tag. Meta has sold sold over 20x as many Oculus units.
• jofla_net 10mo ago
  Spouting inevitability is small-minded. There are plenty "technology" things which have come to pass, most notably weapons, which have been developed which are not allowed to be used by someone to thier fullest due to laws, and social norms against harming others. Theese things are technology, and they would allow someone to attain wealth much more efficiently.... Parrots retort that they are regulated because society sees them as a threat. Well, therein is the disconnect, society isn't immutable, and can come to those conclusions about other technologies tomorrow if it so chooses...
  • jofla_net 10mo ago
    tough crowd
• gmuslera 10mo ago
  For any point of the past, this is the future. It is not what is "best" by some metric, nor what is right, or should be, is what actually happens. It is like saying that evolution goal is intelligence or whatever, is what sticks in the wall. Can we change direction on how things are going? Yes, but you must understand what means the "we" there, at least in the context of global change of direction.
• Antibabelic 10mo ago
  Everything is inevitable. If it happened, then it couldn't have happened otherwise. "Your computer sending screenshots to microsoft so they can train AIs on it" was inevitable, because that's what incentives pushed them to do. Vocal opposition and boycotting might become a different kind of incentive, but in most cases it doesn't work. The fact of the matter is that corporations are powerful, shareholders are powerful, the collective mass of indifferent consumers are powerful, while you are powerless.
  • nyeah 10mo ago
    I think he's just pointing out the fallacy, not necessarily asking for more examples.
  • bigbadfeline 10mo ago
    > The fact of the matter is that... you are powerless. Trivialities don't add anything to the discussion. The question is "Why?" and then "How do we change that?". Even incomplete or inaccurate attempts at answering would be far more valuable than a demonstration of hand-wringing powerlessness.
• d_silin 10mo ago
  On topic of less user-hostile OS , I wonder how this guys are doing: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/ https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/
• tolerance 10mo ago
  This is high quality blog post! I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism. > Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice. Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how this idea works. I think that the problem is that there are too many political statements to compare your own against these days and many of them are made implicit except among the most vocal and ostensibly informed.
  • jjice 10mo ago
    I really don't like the "everything is political" sentiment. Sure, lots of things are or can be, but whenever I see this idea, it usually comes from people who have a very specific mindset that's leaning further in one direction on a political spectrum and is pushing their ideology. To clarify, I don't think pushing an ideology you believe in by posting a blog post is a bad thing. That's your right! I just think I have to read posts that feel like they have a very strong message with more caution. Maybe they have a strong message because they have a very good point - that's very possible! But often times, I see people using this as a way to say "if you're not with me, you're against me". My problem here is that this idea that "everything is political" leaves no room for a middle ground. Is my choice to write some boiler plate code using gen AI truly political? Is it political because of power usage and ongoing investment in gen AI? All that to say, maybe I'm totally wrong, I don't know. I'm open to an argument against mine, because there's a very good chance I'm missing the point.
    • madmountaingoat 10mo ago
      I don't think you're wrong so much as you've tread into some semantic muddy water. What did the OP mean by 'inevitable', 'political' or 'everything'?. A lot hangs on the meaning. I lot of words could be written defending one interpretation over another and the chance of changing anyone's mind on the topic seems slim.
      • 10mo ago
• andrewstuart 10mo ago
  Sure, those specific examples may not be the future. However AI is the future for programming that’s for sure. Ignore it as a programmer to make yourself irrelevant.
• gwbas1c 10mo ago
  I do think AI involvement in programming is inevitable; but at this time a lot of the resistance is because AI programming currently is not the best tool for many jobs. To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heating via a modern heat pump, and I won't go back to using wood as my primary heat source. Burning wood is purely for pleasure, and an insurance policy in case of a power outage or malfunction. What does this have to do with AI programming? I like to think that early central heating systems were unreliable, and often it was just easier to light a fire. But, it hasn't been like that in most of our lifetimes. I suspect that within a decade, AI programming will be "good enough" for most of what we do, and programming without it will be like burning wood: Something we do for pleasure, and something that we need to do for the occasional cases where AI doesn't work.
  • delichon 10mo ago
    For you it's "purely for pleasure," for me it's for money, health and fire protection. I heat my home with my wood stove to bypass about $1,500/year in propane costs, to get exercise (and pleasure) out of cutting and splitting the wood, and to reduce the fuel load around my home. If those reasons went away I'd stop. That's a good metaphor for the rapid growth of AI. It is driven by real needs from multiple directions. For it to become evitable, it would take coercion or the removal of multiple genuine motivators. People who think we can just say no must be getting a lot less value from it then me day to day.
    • jasonshen 10mo ago
      You may be saving money but wood smoke is very much harmful to your lungs and heart according to the American Lung and American Heart Associations + the EPA. There's a good reason why we've adopted modern heating technologies. They may have other problems but particulate pollution is not one of them. > For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased particulate air pollution from wood smoke and other sources to inflammation and clotting, which can predict heart attacks and other heart problems. > A 2013 study in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology found exposure to wood smoke causes the arteries to become stiffer, which raises the risk of dangerous cardiac events. For pregnant women, a 2019 study in Environmental Research connected wood smoke exposure to a higher risk of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include preeclampsia and gestational high blood pressure. https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/12/13/lovely-but-dangerous-wood-fires-bring-health-risks https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/12/13/lovely-but-dangerou...
• encyclopedism 10mo ago
  This is the inevitability of unfettered capitalism. The pressure is towards generating wealth, with the intended hope that the side effect will be that this produces net 'good' for society. It has worked (to varying degrees) and has enabled the modern world. But it may well be running out of steam. I do not think that the current philosophical world view will enable a different path. We've had resets or potential resets, COVID being a huge opportunity, but I think neither the public nor the political class had the strength to seize the moment. We live in a world where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It will take dramatic change to put 'value' back where it belongs and relegate price farther down the ladder.
  • klysm 10mo ago
    COVID was in many ways the opposite of a reset. It further solidified massive wealth disparity and power concentration. The positive feedback loop doesn’t appear to have a good off-ramp.
    • terminalshort 10mo ago
      The off ramp to the loop was always a crisis like a recession or war. Covid could have been such an example. If the government hadn't bailed everyone out, the pandemic would have been a mass casualty event for companies and their owners. The financial crisis of 2008 also would have been such an event if not for the bailouts. The natural state of the economy is boom and bust, with wealth concentration increasing during the booms and dropping during the busts. But it turns out the busts are really painful for everyone, and so our government has learned how to mostly keep them from happening. Turns out people prefer the ever increasing concentration of wealth an power that this results in over the temporary pain of economic depression.
      • matthewdgreen 10mo ago
        This works until it doesn't.
        • 10mo ago
• Aeolun 10mo ago
  I think this person is too optimistic. Everything that will give powerful people money or influence and not get them killed is pretty much near inevitable.
• Maro 10mo ago
  This blog post is not inevitable.
• colesantiago 10mo ago
  I agree AI is definitely not the future, let's stop them. Lets stop AI. What is the best way and how do we stop them?
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• raincole 10mo ago
  I mean... of course it's not the future. It's the present. I have been seeing AI-generated posters and menus in real life on daily basis for about half a year. AI-upscale is completely normalized for average users. I don't know about other fields, but for graphic design we have well past this discussion.
  • skybrian 10mo ago
    It's similar to saying "everyone else is doing it" which is itself a bad argument for doing something badly.
    • raincole 10mo ago
      It's not an argument. It's observation. Just like TikTok. The author doesn't think TikTok is inevitable, and I fully agree with them! But in our real timeline TikTok exists. So TikTok is, unquestionably, the present. Wide adoption of gen-AI is present.
• cons0le 10mo ago
  >Your computer changing where things are on every update is not inevitable. This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the internet now. I don't care about your "U""X" front end garbage. I highly prefer text based sites like this
  • titzer 10mo ago
    It's been driving me nuts for at least a decade. I can't remember which MacOS update it was, but when they reorganized the settings to better align with iOS, it absolutely infuriated me. Nothing will hit my thunder button like taking my skills and knowledge away. I thought I might swear off Mac forever. I've been avoiding upgrading from 13 now. In the past couple of updates, the settings for displays is completely different for no reason. That's a dialog that one doesn't use very often, except for example, when giving a presentation. It's pretty jarring to plug in on stage in front of dozens or even hundreds of people and suddenly you have to figure out a completely unfamiliar and unintuitive way of setting up mirroring. I blame GUIs. They disempower users and put them at mercy of UX "experts" who just rearrange the deck chairs when they get bored and then tell themselves how important they are. https://suno.com/song/797be726-c1b5-4a85-b14a-d67363cd90e9 https://suno.com/song/797be726-c1b5-4a85-b14a-d67363cd90e9
    • dpedu 10mo ago
      The MacOs settings redesign really bothered me too. Maybe it's the 20+ years of muscle memory, or maybe the new one really is that bad, but I find myself clicking around excessively and eventually giving up and using search. I'm with you here.
      • the_other 10mo ago
        It's got a bunch of problems. - some options have moved to menus which make no sense at all (e.g. all the toggles for whether a panel's menubar icon appear in the menu bar have moved off the panel for that feature and onto the Control Centre panel. But Control Centre doesn't have any options of its own, so the entire panel is a waste of time and has created a confusing UX where previously there was a sensible one - loads of useful stuff I do all the time has moved a layer deeper. e.g. there used to be a top-level item called "sharing" for file/internet/printer sharing settings. It's moved one level deeper, below "General". Admittedly, "the average user" who doesn't use sharing features much, let alone wanting to toggle and control them, probably prefers this, but I find it annoying as heck - following on from that, and also exhibited across the whole settings UI is that UI patterns are now inconsistent across panels; this seems to be because the whole thing is a bunch of web views, presumably all controlled by a different team. So they can create whatever UI they like, with whatever tools make sense. Before, I assume, there was more consistency because panels seemed to reuse the same default controls. I'm talking about use of tabs, or drop-downs, or expanders, or modal overlays... every top level panel has some of these, and they use them all differently: some panels expand a list to reach sub controls, some add a model, some just have piles of controls in lozenges - it renders much slower. On my m3 and m4 MPBs you can still see lag. It's utterly insane that on these basically cutting edge processors with heaps of RAM, spare CPUs, >10 GPU cores, etc, the system control panel still lags - they've fallen into the trap of making "features" be represented by horizontal bars with a button or toggle on the right edge. This pattern is found in Google's Material UI as well. It _kinda_ makes sense on a phone, and _almost_ makes sense on a tablet. But on a desktop where most windows could be any width, it introduces a bunch of readability errors. When the window's wide, it's very easy for the eye to lose the horizontal connection between a label and its toggle/button/etc. To get around this, Apple have locked the width of the Settings app... but also seems a bit weird. - don't get me started on what "liquid glass" has done to the look & feel
• lekevicius 10mo ago
  I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in Instagram and Snapchat. Global content discovery is a natural next experiment after extended follow graph. > NFTs were not inevitable. Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely. I could deconstruct more, but the broader point is: coordination is hard. All these can be done by anyone: anyone could have invented Ethereum-like system; anyone could have built a non-fungible standard over that. Inevitability comes from the lack of coordination: when anyone can push whatever future they want, a LOT of things become inevitable.
  • croes 10mo ago
    > Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. I doubt that. There is a reason the videos get longer again. So people could have ignored the short form from the beginning. And wasn’t the matching algorithm the teal killer feature that amazed people, not the length of the videos?
    • lekevicius 10mo ago
      Even if that's true, that sub-minute videos are not the apex content, that only goes to prove inevitability. Every idea will be tested and measured; the best-performing ones will survive. There can't be any coordination or consensus like "we shouldn't have that" - the only signal is, "is this still the most performant medium + algorithm mix?"
• titzer 10mo ago
  > Most old people in particular (sorry mom) have given up and resigned themselves to drift wherever their computing devices take them, because under the guise of convenience, everything is so hostile that there is no point trying to learn things, and dark patterns are everywhere. Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated, but at the same time trying to wrestle control from the parasites is an uphill battle that they expect to lose, with more frustration as a result. I'm pretty cynical, but one ray of hope is that AI-assisted coding tools have really brought down the skill requirement for doing some daunting programming tasks. E.g. in my case, I have long avoided doing much web or UI programming because there's just so much to learn and so many deep rabbit holes to go down. But with AI tools I can get off the ground in seconds or minutes and all that gruddy HTML/JavaScript/CSS with bazillions of APIs that I could go spend time studying and tinkering with have already been digested by the AI. It spits out some crap that does the thing I mostly want. ChatGPT 5+ is pretty good at navigating all the Web APIs so it was able to generate some WebAudio mini apps to start working with. The code looks like crap, so I hit it with a stick and get it to reorganize the code a little and write some comments, and then I can dive in and do the rest myself. It's a starting point, a prototype. It got me over the activation energy hump, and now I'm not so reluctant to actually try things out. But like I said, I'm cynical. Right now the AI tools haven't been overly enshittified to the point they only serve their masters. Pretty soon they will be, and in ways we can't yet imagine.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• nostrademons 10mo ago
  I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited. If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.
  • cloogshicer 10mo ago
    Your point of view is based on extreme reductionism.
    • Terretta 10mo ago
      It's nature. Whether that word is reductionism is an exercise left to Chomsky?
      • rmah 10mo ago
        Game theory is no more a description of nature than Euclidian geometry is.
        • jlawson 10mo ago
          Sure, but go try to build a house while ignoring what Euclidean geometry tells you about it.
• ansc 10mo ago
  Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I disagree a whole lot. The whole problem is that is it inevitable. Technology is an enormous organism. It does not care about the ethical or moral considerations of it. It's a tug-of-war who can use most technique to succeed -- if you do not use it, you fall behind. Individuals absolutely can not shape the future of technology. States can attempt, but as they make use of technology for propaganda and similar reasons -- they are also in a requirement of it. It is inevitable as long as you keep digging.
  • yawpitch 10mo ago
    > Technology is a living organism. Oh my, the shear number of philosophers, biologists, ethicists, and, for that matter, bacterium rotating in their graves. Life might be a technology… many technologies are not only not-living, they’re mutually contradictory with life.
    • ansc 10mo ago
      A bit mean-spirited I think, but not unreasonable. organism: "a system or organization consisting of interdependent parts, compared to a living being". I removed the "living" part of it to allow for a bit more... abstract thinking.
  • layer8 10mo ago
    Technology does nothing without humans enacting it, and humans do care about its ethical and moral considerations. Or at least some do, and everyone should. Individuals do collectively shape the future of technology.
    • ansc 10mo ago
      I wish that was true. Not adopting technology carries penalties. Almost always enough for it to be a requirement. Even so, "humans do care about its ethical and moral considerations": whose ethics? enforced how? measured how? you're going to fight efficiency and functionality? good luck.
• zkmon 10mo ago
  You are mistaken. The future is defined by the common man on the steet. Those are the same people who use Whatsapp, Facebook and instagram accounts heavily and regularly. They will soon become the biggest drivers of AI adaption. The techies are drop in the ocean. You may build a new tech or device, but the adaption is driven by the crowd who just drift away without a pinch of resistance.
  • zwnow 10mo ago
    Because the average media incompetent Joe is easy to influence. Just spread some tinfoil hat theories, or fearmonger publicly and they have nothing else to talk about. They wouldn't even understand how bad big tech is if you forced them to research for a month. Humans are way more stupid than we believe (just look at all the people who'd love to cuddle a wild bear they meet in Yellowstone). That we managed to get on top of the food chain is a miracle.
  • Mithriil 10mo ago
    But then the pinch of resistance makes an island of likewise thinkers. And there doesn't need to be more than .05% of techies to make great products that otherwise anti-correlate with what people claim as inevitable. We should stop with over-generalization like "The future is defined by the common man on the street." It's always much more complex than that. To every trend, there is a counter-trend (even sometimes alt-trends that are not actually opposites).
  • immibis 10mo ago
    I don't understand people who use Instagram. I installed it for one specific person, and from opening the app to closing it, there's nothing but a nonstop torrent of pure garbage. I don't talk to that person much any more.
• jasonshen 10mo ago
  At the highest level, this becomes a question of whether we live in a predetermined universe or not. Historians do debate the Great Man vs Great Forces narrative of human development, but even if many historical events were "close calls" or "almost didn't happens" it doesn't mean that the counterfactual would be better. Discrete things like the Juicero might not have happened, but ridiculous "smart internet-connected products" that raised lots of VC money during the ZIRP era feels inevitable to me. Do we really think LLMs and the generative AI craze would have not occurred if Sam Altman chose to stay at Y Combinator or otherwise got hit by a bus? People clearly like to interact with a seemingly smart digital agent, demonstrated as early as ELIZA in 1966 and SmarterChild in 2001. My POV is that human beings have innate biases and preferences that tend to manifest what we invent and adopt. I don't personally believe in a supernatural God but many people around the world do. Alcoholic beverages have been independently discovered in numerous cultures across the world over centuries. I think the best we can do is usually try to act according to our own values and nudge it in a direction we believe is best (both things OP is doing so this is not a dunk on them, just my take on their thoughts here).
• podlp 10mo ago
  As a counterpoint, consider reading Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable.” I also avoid most social media and have an aversion to all things “smart,” but these may actually be “inevitable.” In a capitalist society, these forces feel inevitable because there’s no Anubis balancing the scales. Only local decisions, often short-sighted. When demand is being created in a market, people will compete to capture it any way possible. Some of those ideas will last, and others will be a flash in the pan. It’s not clear to me that if you reran the tapes of history again, you’d get a significantly different outcome that didn’t include things like short-form video to exploit attention. https://kk.org/books/the-inevitable https://kk.org/books/the-inevitable
• whitehexagon 10mo ago
  >I want to emphasize here that there are good products (both software and hardware) on the market I was hoping to find such a list within the article, i.e. which companies and products should we be supporting that are doing things 'the right way'?
• deleted 10mo ago
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• voxleone 10mo ago
  The author says>> "Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated, but at the same time trying to wrestle control from the parasites is an uphill battle that they expect to lose, with more frustration as a result." While this reaction is understandable, it is difficult to feel sympathy when so few people are willing to invest the time and effort required to actually understand how these systems work and how they might be used defensively. Mastery, even partial, is one of the few genuine avenues toward agency. Choosing not to pursue it effectively guarantees dependence. Ironically, pointing this out often invites accusations of being a Luddite or worse.
  • iterance 10mo ago
    The fact is, most of the systems people use in their day do day that behave the way described simply require no mastery whatsoever. If your product, service, or device is locked behind learning a new skill, any skill, that will inherently limit the possible size of the audience. Far more than most realize. We can rail against this reality, but it is unforgiving. The average person who is struggling to put food on the table only has so many hours in the week to spare to stick it to the man by learning a new operating system.
    • mason_mpls 10mo ago
      It seems we’re all experiencing a form of sticker shock, from the bill for getting ease-of-use out of software that we demanded for the past few decades.
  • mason_mpls 10mo ago
    It’s a trope now that loads of internet users will complain about Mac OS & Windows, while digging in their heels against switching to Linux. Just take your medicine people.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • Mithriil 10mo ago
• ang_cire 10mo ago
  Inevitability just means that something WILL happen, and many of those items are absolutely inevitable: AI exists -> vacation photos exist -> it's inevitable that someone was eventually going to use AI to enhance their vacation photos. As one of those niche power users who runs servers at home to be beholden to fewer tech companies, I still understand that most people would choose Netflix over a free jellyfin server they have to administer. > Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated I regret to inform you, OP, that this is not true. It's true for exactly the kind of tech people like us who are already doing this stuff, because it's why we do it. Your assumption that people who don't just "gave up", as opposed to actively choosing not to spend their time on managing their own tech environment, is I think biased by your predilection for technology. I wholeheartedly share OP's dislike of techno-capitalism(derogatory), but OP's list is a mishmash of 1) technologies, which are almost never intrinsically bad, and 2) business choices, which usually are. An Internet-connected bed isn't intrinsically bad; you could set one up yourself to track your sleep statistics that pushes the data to a server you control. It's the companies and their choices to foist that technology on people in harmful ways that makes it bad. This is the gripe I have with anti-AI absolutists: you can train AI models on data you own, to benefit your and other communities. And people are! But companies are misusing the technology in service of the profit motive, at the expense of others whose data they're (sometimes even illegally) ingesting. Place the blame in the appropriate place. Something something, hammers don't kill people.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• Levitz 10mo ago
  It's technically not inevitable, sure. What has to happen for this not to become the future though, and what are the odds of that happening? The rational choice is to act as if this was ensured to be the future. If it ends up not being the case, enough people will have made that mistake that your failure will be minuscule in the grand scheme of things, and if it's not and this is the future, you won't be left behind. Sure beats sticking your feet in the sand and most likely fucking up or perhaps being right in the end, standing between the flames.
• Rperry2174 10mo ago
  nothing is inevitable IN THEORY... but in practice, systems that minimize effort beat systems that maximize agency. People want things to be simpler, easier, frictionless. Resistance to these things has a cost and generally the ROI is not worth it for most people as whole
  • tonyhart7 10mo ago
    seems the author never work in normal day to day job basis in average company nothing in real life is ideal, that just reality
  • Mithriil 10mo ago
    Actors that go against the current, for the sake of going against the current, exist. Always a minority, but never negligeable, I believe.
• yanis_t 10mo ago
  I remember the was a guy who regularly posted tech predictions and then every year adjusted and reflected on his predictions. Can anyone help me find it?
  • username223 10mo ago
    Rodney Brooks? https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/ https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-...
    • yanis_t 10mo ago
      That’s the guy, thank you!
• barfoure 10mo ago
  Sigh… “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.”
• preommr 10mo ago
  > Juicero was not inevitable. Yea, I remember the time when trillion dollar companies were betting the house on Juicero /s
• square_usual 10mo ago
  Sure, the technology that real people in your life, including most "normies" who only use tech to get stuff done, are using ChatGPT, but it's not "inevitable".
  • devin 10mo ago
    Your claim that most people (even "normies") are using LLMs is just an offshoot of the inevitability nonsense. Most people _aren't_ using LLMs.
    • mason_mpls 10mo ago
      Most people just want their software easy & free (for fair reasons), and this is the end result of that
    • terminalshort 10mo ago
      Everyone who runs a Google search and doesn't read past the Gemini result uses an LLM. That's easily a majority without even getting into other products.
    • square_usual 10mo ago
      Do you have any proof for that? ChatGPT has a DAU in the ~100m range as of last reporting. Even considering it's a global audience, that's almost a third of the US population.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• garg 10mo ago
  It's not inevitable but it's probable.
• shishy 10mo ago
  The idea that the future is architected by our choices (or lack of it) is the crux of one of the opportunity spaces at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) in the UK. Worth getting on your radar if this stuff is of interesting: https://aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/collective-flourishing/ https://aria.org.uk/opportunity-spaces/collective-flourishin... (full disclosure: I'm working with the programme director on helping define the funding programme, so if you're working on related problems, by all means share your thoughts on the site or by reaching out!)
  • bostonwalker 10mo ago
    RE your link, I am not sure that anything of value has been articulated in describing this vague notion of "Collective Flourishing". After reading the page two or three times, the best I can understand is that it seems to be a call for technical solutions to problems that are actually deeply social in nature and require social solutions. Strange to see such nebulous slop coming from an official government agency.
    • shishy 10mo ago
      Hi - the opportunity space page is meant to be broad; a more specific and targeted programme thesis within that is going to come out in the coming months. I should mention that it's not just a call for technical solutions because, as you note, a lot of this is deeply rooted in social systems and requires design solutions (i.e. it's not just building more tech). But that is good feedback!
• jgalecki 10mo ago
  This post rhymes with a great quote from Joseph Weizenbaum: "The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But, in fact, there are actors!"
  • mason_mpls 10mo ago
    Perhaps we need more collective action & coordination? I don’t see how we could politically undermine these systems, but we could all do more to contribute to open source workarounds. We could contribute more to smart tv/e-reader/phone & tablet jailbreak ecosystems. We could contribute more to the fediverse projects. We could all contribute more to make Linux more user friendly.
    • __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
      I admire volunteer work, but I don't think we should focus too hard on paths forward that summarize to "the volunteers need to work harder". If we like what they're doing we show find ways to make it more likely to happen. For instance, we could forbid taxpayer money from being spent on proprietary software and on hardware that is insufficiently respectful of its user, and we could require that 50% of the money not spent on the now forbidden software instead be spent on sponsorships of open source contributors whose work is likely to improve the quality of whatever open alternatives are relevant. Getting Microsoft and Google out of education would be huge re: denormalizing the practice of accepting eulas and letting strangers host things you rely on without understanding how they're leveraging that position against your interests. France and Germany are investing in open source (https://chipp.in/news/france-and-germany-launch-docs-an-open-source-alternative-for-google-docs/ https://chipp.in/news/france-and-germany-launch-docs-an-open...), though perhaps not as aggressively as I've proposed. Let's join them.
  • ericmcer 10mo ago
    That reminds me of water use in California. We frequently have droughts, and the messaging is always to reduce water usage. I have friends who turn the shower off while soaping up just to save a few gallons out of civic duty. Meanwhile a few companies are using more water than every residential user combined to grow alfalfa, half of which gets shipped overseas. Like ban one company from selling livestock feed to Asia/Saudi Arabia and the drought for 40 million people is solved. but people just throw their hands up "looks like another drought this year! Thats California!".
• dale_glass 10mo ago
  Individual specific things are not inevitable. But many generic concepts are because of various market, social and other forces. There's such a thing as "multiple invention", precisely because of this. Because we all live in the same world, we have similar needs and we have similar tools available. So different people in different places keep trying to solve the same problems, build the same grounding for future inventions. Many people want to do stuff at night, so many people push at the problem of lighting. Edison's particular light bulb wasn't inevitable, but electric lighting was inevitable in some form. So with regards to generative AI, many people worked in this field for a long time. I played with fractals and texture generators as a kid. Many people want for many reasons. Artwork is expensive. Artwork is sometimes too big. Or too fixed, maybe we want variation. There's many reasons to push at the problem, and it's not coordinated. I had a period where I was fiddling around with generating assets for Second Life way back because I found that personally interesting. And I'm sure I was not the only one by any means. That's what I understand by "inevitable", that without any central planning or coordination many roads are being built to the same destination and eventually one will get there. If not one then one of the others.
• efields 10mo ago
  Humans making the most of the situation they're in is inevitable.
  • xenocratus 10mo ago
    "Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome"
• mason_mpls 10mo ago
  I personally really like Apple Vision and the bar it’s pushing. However, using one of these devices long term in a walled garden sounds like a nightmare for privacy and marketing abuse of users.
• racktash 10mo ago
  (Highly subjective opinion incoming.) I've been thinking a lot lately, challenging some of my long-held assumptions... Big tech, the current AI trend, social media websites serving up rage bait and misinformation (not to imply this is all they do, or that they are ALL bad), the current political climate and culture... In my view, all of these are symptoms, and the cause is the perverse, largely unchallenged neoliberal world in which the West has spent the last 30-40 years (at least) living in. Profit maximising comes before everything else. (Large) Corporate interests are almost never challenged. The result? Deliberately amoral public policy that serves the rich and powerful. There are oases in this desert (which is, indeed, not inevitable), thankfully. As the author mentioned, there's FOSS. There's indie-created games/movies. There's everyday goodness between decent people.
• jp0001 10mo ago
  Mobile device updates are the worst for aging parents. These devices are getting more complex to use not easier, you shouldn't have to upend your life once a year because UX design choices forces you to miss what you think is important, how to find it, or disable/enable features you don't want or used to have.
• tambourine_man 10mo ago
  Just because one outcome is more likely, doesn't mean we can't actively work to prevent it. Swimming against the tide is sometimes required.
• jraines 10mo ago
  I like the sentiment but saying “ads are not inevitable” is just holding your breath until mom gives you ice cream for dinner
• orthecreedence 10mo ago
  Another post arguing against the profit mechanism and modern commercial capitalism without realizing it. It's arguing against the symptoms. The problem is a system that incentivizes creating markets where a market was not needed and convincing people it will make their lives better. Yes, the problem is cultural, but it's also deeply ingrained in our economic protocol now. You can't scream into the void about specific problems and expect change unless you look at the root causes.
  • jatora 10mo ago
    Following this thread takes you into political territory and governmental/regulatory capture, which I believe is the root issue that cannot be solved in late stage capitalism. We are headed towards (or already in) corporate feudalism and I don't think anything can realistically be done about it. Not sure if this is nihilism or realism but the only real solution I see is on the individual level: make enough money that you don't have to really care about the downsides of the system (upper middle class). So while I agree with you, I think I just disagree with the little bit you said about "cant expect anything to change without-" and would just say: cant expect anything to change except through the inertia of what already is in place.
• BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
  I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being against the internet, industrialization, print press or mobile phones. The idea that AI is anything less than paradigm shifting, or even revolutionary is weird to me. I can only say being against this is either it’s self-interest or not able to grasp it. So if I produce something art, product, game, book and if it’s good, and if it’s useful to you, fun to you, beautiful to you and you cannot really determine whether it’s AI. Does it matter? Like how does it matter? Is it because they “stole” all the art in the world. But somehow if a person “influenced” by people, ideas, art in less efficient way almost we applaud that because what else, invent the wheel again forever?
  • munificent 10mo ago
    > Like how does it matter? If I look at a piece of art that was made by a human who earned money for making that art, then it means an actual real human out there was able to put food on their table. If I look at a piece of "art" produced by a generative AI that was trained on billions of works from people in the previous paragraph, then I have wasted some electricity even further enriching a billionaire and encouraging a world where people don't have the time to make art.
    • terminalshort 10mo ago
      When you consider the inputs, human art uses much more electricity than the bit of inference that AI art takes.
      • munificent 10mo ago
        Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person. I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers. If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.
• eykanal 10mo ago
  Now seems like a good time to remind folks of the Stanford dead fish fMRI study: https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-reminds-us-about-fmri-analysis/ https://law.stanford.edu/2009/09/18/what-a-dead-salmon-remin... fMRI has always had folks highlighting how shaky the science is. It's not the strongest of experimental techniques.
  • etskinner 10mo ago
    Seems like you meant to post this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288415 , not here
    • eykanal 10mo ago
      :facepalm: thank you
• agentultra 10mo ago
  Fatalism is a part of the language of fascism. Statements like, "it is inevitable," are supposing that we cannot change the future and should submit to what our interlocutor is proposing. It's a rhetorical tool to avoid critique. Someone who says, "programming as a profession is over, AI will inevitably replace developers so learn to use it and get with the program," isn't inviting discussion. But this is not how the future works and TFA is right to point out that these things are rarely ever, "inevitable." What is inevitable? The heat death of the universe. You probably don't need to worry about it much. Everything else can change. If someone is proposing that a given technology is, "inevitable," it's a signal that we should think about what that technology does, what it's being used to do to people, and who profits from doing it to them.
• atomicnature 10mo ago
  Only one thing comes to mind: The species as a whole will evolve inevitably; the individual animal may not.
  • marcosdumay 10mo ago
    The only thing inevitable in evolution is that some change will happen. Everything else is complex, path-dependent, and subject to influences.
• resca79 10mo ago
  I agree with the core point. I’d add that modern marketing isn’t really aiming for heterogeneity, but for eventually producing behaviorally homogeneous user clusters.Many product and tech choices today are about shaping user behavior so users become more predictable and therefore more monetizable. During this transition phase, the system tolerates (or creates) heterogeneity, but at the cost of complexity, friction, and inefficiency, which are mostly pushed onto users. In that sense, this is less about “the future” and more about engineering markets through data, with trade-offs that are rarely made explicit
• davidw 10mo ago
  I feel like it's time for a new direction in tech. Open source was a lot of fun (because I was young), but then it sort of became the default for a lot of infrastructure. I liked PG's take on startups and some cool ones came out of that era. But now the whole thing is collapsing on itself and "Silicon Valley" is broadly becoming disliked if not reviled by a lot of people, with cartoonish figures like Musk, or Joe Lonsdale calling for public hangings. The sense of wonder and innovation feels gone to me. It's still out there somewhere, though, I think, and it'd be nice to recover some of that. LLM's owned by megacorps aren't really where it's at for me - I want to see small teams in garages making something new and fun.
• reedlaw 10mo ago
  This concept is also known as Borg Complex: https://thefrailestthing.com/2013/03/01/borg-complex-a-primer/ https://thefrailestthing.com/2013/03/01/borg-complex-a-prime...
  • nodenoise 10mo ago
    "Marshall McLuhan once said, 'There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.' The handwaving rhetoric that I’ve called a Borg Complex is resolutely opposed to just such contemplation when it comes to technology and its consequences. We need more thinking, not less, and Borg Complex rhetoric is typically deployed to stop rather than advance discussion. What’s more, Borg Complex rhetoric also amounts to a refusal of responsibility. We cannot, after all, be held responsible for what is inevitable. Naming and identifying Borg Complex rhetoric matters only insofar as it promotes careful thinking and responsible action." This is great, thanks for the link.
• flr03 10mo ago
  As a tech person the older I get the less tech interests me. Analogical is where I get the fun from, no more smart watch, smart tv, spotify, connected home things, automatic coffee machine, no thank you.
  • EvanAnderson 10mo ago
    Almost no new technology is respectful enough to its users for me to consider making accomodations for it in my life. It's not just that it's not fun. Any fun I derive is canceled-out by the inevitable loss. I've felt white-hot blazing anger so many times when a feature is taken away by an "update" that I am not permitted to revert. I don't want to feel that feeling anymore.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• strangescript 10mo ago
  "This post is to underline that Nothing is inevitable." Inevitable and being a holdout are conceptually different and you can't expect society as a whole to care or respect your personal space with regards to it. They listed smartphones as a requirement an example. That is great, have fun with your flip phone, but that isn't for most people. Just because you don't find something desirable doesn't mean you deserve extra attention or a special space. It also doesn't you can call people catering to the wants of the masses as "grifters".
• paganel 10mo ago
  Everything mentioned in the article was inevitable (maybe not in this exact form, but as a principle) for us fans of Jacques Ellul and Uncle Ted. At least the money was quite good for many in the industry, for some of them it still is.
• chaostheory 10mo ago
  The genie is already out of the bottle. Even if we stopped AI development now, anyone can use an open weight model. Besides the bigger issue is that this blog post offers no concrete way forward.
• tqi 10mo ago
  This article has such palpable distain for the people who consume these products that it makes me wonder why the author even cares what kind of future they inhabit. > But what is important to me is to keep the perspective of what consitutes a desirable future, and which actions get us closer or further from that. Desirable to whom? I certainly don't think the status quo is perfect, but I do think dismissing it as purely the product of some faceless cadre of tech oligarchs desires is arrogant. People do have agency, the author just doesn't like what they have chosen to do with it...
• empressplay 10mo ago
  Rather than pointlessly lament the destructive power of fire, we should be spending our time learning how to fire-proof our homes. These are all natural forces, they may be human forces but they are still natural forces. We can't stop them, we can only mitigate them -- and we _can_ mitigate them, but not if we just stick our fingers in our ears and pretend it's not going to happen. It absolutely is. Whatever you can imagine. All of it.
• danielovichdk 10mo ago
  Fine piece of what it's really about. The feeling of losing one's joy and possible applause for doing a good job. But the inevitable is not a fact, it's a rigged fake that is, unfortunately, adapted by humans which flock in such large groups, echoing the same sentiments that it for those people seem real and inevitable. Humans in general are extremely predictable, yet, so predictable that they seem utterly stupid and imbecile.
• po1nt 10mo ago
  Human action is inevitable. Ask Mises.
• markus_zhang 10mo ago
  I’d still say, this is the future, like it or not. See how much capital has been poured into the caldron? None of the items is technically inevitable, but the world runs on capital, and capital alone. Tech advances are just a by product of capital snooping around trying to increase itself.
  • epidemiology 10mo ago
    The world runs on capital until it runs on votes, and sometimes bullets.
    • markus_zhang 10mo ago
      That’s true!
• lccerina 10mo ago
  An interesting perspective on this is why Facebook kept the Sun's microsystems sign in their Palo Alto HQ. Nothing in tech is inevitable, nothing in tech is irreplaceable, nothing in tech is permanent. Shout out to the Juicero example, because there are so many people out there showing that AI can be also "just squeeze the bag with your hands".
• throwaway13337 10mo ago
  The path we're on is not inevitable. But narratives keep it locked in. Narratives are funny because they can be completely true and a total lie. There's now a repeated narrative about how the AI bubble is like the railroads and dotcom and therefore will end the same. Maybe. But that makes it seem inevitable. But those who have that story can't see anything else and might even cause that to happen, collectively. We can frame things with stories and determine the outcomes by them. If enough people believe that story, it becomes inevitable. There are many ways to look at the same thing and many different types of stories we can tell - each story makes different things inevitable. So I have a story I'd like to promote: There were once these big companies that controlled computing. They had it locked down. Then came ibm clones and suddenly, the big monopolies couldn't keep up with innovation via the larger marketplaces that opened up with standard (protocol) hardware interfaces. And later, the internet was new and exciting - compuserve and AOL were so obviously going to control the internet. But then open protocols and services won because how could they not? It was inevitable that a locked down walled garden could not compete with the dynamism that open protocols allowed. Obviously now, this time is no different. And, in fact, we're at an inflection point that looks a lot like those other times in computing that favored tiny upstarts that made lives better but didn't make monopoly-sized money. The LLMs will create new ways to compete (and have already) that big companies will be slow to follow. The costs of creating software will go down so that companies will have to compete on things that align with user's interests. User's agency will have to be restored. And open protocols will again win over closed for the same reasons they did before. Companies that try to compete with the old, cynical model will rapidly lose customers and will not be able to adapt. The money possible to be made in software will decline but users will have software in their interests. The AI megacorps have no moat - chinese downloadable models are almost as good. People will again control their own data. It's inevitable.
• redactsureAI 10mo ago
  "Ads are not inevitable." is a pretty bold statement that really damages the argument. Mixing fundamental things like that in with Juicero prevents a good will discussion. Ads are one of the oldest and most fundamental parts of a modern society. Mixing obviously dumb things in with fundamental ones doesn't improve the point.
• chaseadam17 10mo ago
  Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't. Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds. But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food took it too far. Similarly, most software is net positive, but some apps take it too far. Perhaps a good indicator of which companies history will view negatively are the ones where there's a high concentration of executives rationalizing their behavior as "it's inevitable."
  • mat_b 10mo ago
    Agree and disagree. It is also possible to take a step back and look at the very large picture and see that these things actually are somewhat inevitable. We do exist in a system where "if I don't do it first, someone else will, and then they will have an advantage" is very real and very powerful. It shapes our world immensely. So, while I understand what the OP is saying, in some ways it's like looking at a river of water and complaining that the water particles are moving in a direction that the levees pushed them. The levees are actually the bigger problem.
    • chaseadam17 10mo ago
      We are the levees in your metaphor and we have agency. The problem is not that one founder does something before another and gains an advantage. The problem is the millions of people who buy or use the harmful thing they create - and that we all have control over. If we continue down this path we'll end up at free will vs determinism and I choose to believe the future is not inevitable.
      • mat_b 10mo ago
        We aren't the real levees though. The system we live in is. Yes, a few people will push back and try to change the momentum to a different direction but that's painful and we have enough going on each day that most people don't have time for that (let alone agree on the direction). Structural change is the only real way to guide the river.
• teejmya 10mo ago
  https://archive.is/cuLBs https://archive.is/cuLBs
• codyb 10mo ago
  The less I use tech these days the happier I seem to be. I'm basically down to Anki cards, Chrono Trigger, and the Money Matters newsletter on my phone (plus calls and messaging). Recently I've dropped Youtube in favor of reading the New Yorker's that're piling up more frequently. Is it just me or is software actively getting worse too? I feel like I'm noticing more rough edges, the new Mac OS update doesn't feel as smooth as I use to expect from Apple products. Life is just calmer, get an antenna and PBS, use your library, look at the fucking birds lol. The deluge of misinformation isn't worth it for the good nuggets at this point
• s08148692 10mo ago
  The irony of naming this post "This is not the future" and leaving no room for the possibility that this is actually probably the future. Whole post just reads as someone disgruntled at the state of the world and reeling that they aren't getting their way. Theres a toxic air of intellectual and moral superiority in that blog
• BoppreH 10mo ago
  Hot take, but I blame 90% of these problems on the internet's overreliance on funding from advertisement. It all flows from there: 1. To display ads is to sacrifice user experience. This is a slippery slope and both developers and users get used to it, which affects even ad-free services. Things like "yes/maybe later" become normal. 2. Ads are only displayed when the user visits the service directly. Therefore we cannot have open APIs, federation, alternative clients, or user customization. 3. The advertisement infrastructure is expensive. This has to be paid with more ads. Like the rocket equation, this eventually plateaus, but by then the software is bloated and cannot be funded traditionally anymore, so any dips are fatal. Constant churn. 4. Well targeted ads are marginally more profitable, therefore all user information is valuable. Cue an entire era of tracking, privacy violations, and psychological manipulation. 5. Advertiser don't want to be associated with anything remotely controversial, so the circle of acceptable content shrinks every year. The fringes become worse and worse. 6. The system only works with a very large number of users. It becomes socially expected to participate, and at the same time, no customer support is provided when things go wrong. I'm fairly sure ads are our generation's asbestos or leaded gasoline, and would be disappointed if they are not largely banned in the future.
• 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  Ads are inevitable assuming a capitalistic fueled Internet continues. If you can remember the early WWW, you know ads weren't there, but e-commerce existed in a rudimentary fashion. You couldn't buy anything by clicking a mouse, but you could go and download a catalog or some shareware with a phone number during installation for the sales team to give you a license key.
• user99979 10mo ago
  Just get a new iPhone and keeping paying for iCloud. I really resonate with older folks going with the flow on technology. My dad has to watch 90 second ads on his TV to see YouTube videos. I hate it for him.
• Mithriil 10mo ago
  I think what people tend to forget when speaking of inevitability is that the scope of their statement is important. *Existence* of a situation as inevitable isn't so bold of a claim. For example, someone will use an AI technology to cheat on an exam. Fine, it's possible. Heck, it is mathematically certain if we have a civilization that has exams and AI techs, and if that civilization runs infinitely. *Generality* of a situation as inevitable, however, tends to go the other way.
• jollyllama 10mo ago
  In general I agree.The list of non-inevitable things at the end is interesting. Broadly speaking, I would bin them into two categories. The first category contains things like this: > Tiktok is not inevitable. Things like this become widespread without coercion. I don't use TikTok or any short-form video and there's nothing forcing me to. For a while, Facebook fed me reels, and I fell for it once or twice, but recognized how awful it was and quit. However, the Tiktok and junk food are appealing to many people even though they are slop. The dark truth is that many people walking around just like slop, and unless there's any restraint imposed from external actors, they'll consume as much as is shoveled into their troughs. But, at the end of the day, you can live your life without using Tiktok at all. The other category would be things that become widespread on the back of coercion, to varying degrees. > Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable. This is much trickier to do than living without Tiktok. It's harder to get through airports or even rent a parking space now. Your alternative options will be removed by others.
• wendgeabos 10mo ago
  The OP confuses "inevitable" with "totalizing" in part. Many bad things seem likely to be adopted by large numbers of people, and yet that does not mean everyone will be somehow forced into adopting these things.
• hermitcrab 10mo ago
  “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber I guess the problem is scale. A system based on altruism, trust and reciprocity might work great for a community of 20 people. But it doesn't scale to millions of people. Consequently, we end up with (in the West) various shades of democracy, "the least bad system". However, democracy doesn't work well when a tiny fabulously-rich elite is able to buy up all the media and a sizeable chunk of the politicians.
• w10-1 10mo ago
  Any theory of how people behave works so long as (key) people follow it. It's not really game theory but economics: the supply curve for nicely contended markets, and transaction costs for everything. Game theory only addresses the information aspects of transaction costs, and translates mostly only for equal power and information (markets). The more enduring theory is the roof; i.e., it mostly reduces to what team you're on: which mafia don, or cold-war side, or technology you're leveraging for advantage. In this context, signaling matters most: identifying where you stand. As an influencer, the signal is that you're the leading edge, so people should follow you. The betas vie to grow the alpha, and the alpha boosts or cuts betas to retain their role as decider. The roof creates the roles and empowers creatures, not vice-versa. The character of the roof depends on resources available: what military, economic, spiritual or social threat is wielded (in the cold war, capitalism, religion or culture wars). The roof itself - the political franchise of the protection racket - is the origin of "civilization". The few escapes from such oppression are legendary and worth emulating, but rare. Still, that's our responsibility: to temper or escape.
• stuffn 10mo ago
  This is definitely a stallman-esque shitpost. Casual thinking, as the author implies is necessary, would make you realize all of this was inevitable. The whole reason the tech boom existed, the whole reason the author is typing on what I can only guess is a 2005 T-series, the whole reason the internet made it, the whole reason all of this works, is STRICTLY because they wrenched control from us. If FOSS was gonna work it would've by now. I love FOSS, but FOSS enthusiasts are so obnoxiously snobby about everything. In 30+ years linux has wrenched all of 1-2% more of the desktop market away from the giants. This was all inevitable.
• lbrito 10mo ago
  I share the sentiment about the state of things but can't relate to whether any of it is literally inevitable or not. To me it just doesn't matter. Inevitable or not, this is the world we live in, and its not like I (or any group of likeminded people) can change anything. So technically inevitable or not, it doesn't matter. People will at large keep using smart refrigerators and Tiktok.
• block_dagger 10mo ago
  I think ads were actually inevitable. Economies function on product/service awareness.
• olelele 10mo ago
  "Talking to chatbots instead of public servants is not inevitable." I firmly believe this is where people will get the most annoyed in the long run. Not having any public facing human beings will lose people.
  • tim333 10mo ago
    It's possible the chabots may become more helpful than the current unfortunate situation.
• nunez 10mo ago
  I sympathize with this so deeply: > "Requiring a smartphone to exist in society is not inevitable." Seeing smartphones morph from super neat computer/camera/music players in our pockets to unfiltered digital nicotine is depressing to think about. Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO. Every app that you think of when you think of "addictive" apps heavily relies on the notifications funnel (badges, toasts, dings) for engagement. I'm disappointed that we as a society have normalized unabated casino-tier attention grabs from our most personal computing devices. Growth through free, ad-subsidized tiers also helped create this phenomenon, but that strategy wouldn't be nearly as effective without delivery via notifications. Big AI (more like LLM/Stable Diffusion as a Service) is going to prey on that to levels never seen before, and I'm definitely not here for it. Obligatory end-of-post anecdote: My phone stays home most of the time when I work out. I only bring my Apple Watch. My gym bag has an iPad mini and a BOOX eReader, but I only use the iPad to do Peloton stretches and listen to KEXP Archives, as those can't be done from my watch (though I'm working on something for the latter). Using this setup has given me a lot of opportunities to soak in my surroundings during rest periods. Most of that is just seeing people glued to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. TV addiction on steroids, in other words. Thanks to this, people like me who use their phones as tools are forced to carry huge, heavy black slabs because small phones aren't viable and, as market analysis is showing, thin and lightweight slabs won't cut it either.
  • otterley 10mo ago
    > Notifications abuse is _entirely_ to blame, IMO. You do know you can disable notifications on a per-app basis, or even entirely, right?
    • nunez 10mo ago
      Yes, and I do that aggressively. But that's an opt-in behavior, and like most things that are opt-in, people can't be bothered, and companies know that.
• underlipton 10mo ago
  I would argue that the Apple Vision Pro is a rare example of something that WAS inevitable BECAUSE of the misbehavior described. Every large VR company COULD have just created and iterated on the basic design that Palmer Luckey (aside: who is also a villain here, too; don't read to much into the name-drop) forced everyone to recognize as viable, slowly developing the technology in the organic way other computing platforms came about. Instead, they all played a decade-long game of chicken, trying to bait their rivals into being the Xerox or Rio of the technology, to their... well, Apple. That is, letting them do all the hard work in standing up the tech's basic user experience, use cases, etc., then swooping in with a polished product offering. None of these companies wanted to get Apple'd, and they (particularly Facebook) did everything they could to pay lip service to developing VR without funding anything really groundbreaking (or even obvious). Apple finally had to release something after years of promising shareholders that they weren't going to get left behind in the market, and with nothing material to skim off of competitors, the AVP is what we got. Until Apple figures out how to dig up and purify its deep-rooted cultural rot, and learn how to actually innovate independently, every halfway-aware competitor is going to hold back development on anything they might want to appropriate. In the meantime, we all lose.
• underlipton 10mo ago
  Something related: https://coolguy.website/the-future-will-be-technical/ https://coolguy.website/the-future-will-be-technical/
• kazinator 10mo ago
  There is a possibly less harmful trend now than internet-connected beds: electrically grounded beds and bedding. There is a whole quackery around some alleged benefits of being electrically grounded while you sleep. LOL!
• hettygreen 10mo ago
  Leave Juicero out of this, luddite! goes back to squeezing juice packets into a cup
• liyul 10mo ago
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• deleted 10mo ago
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• BrenBarn 10mo ago
  Amen to this. There's a certain mindset that seems depressingly prevalent in tech, which I can't even call fatalism because it doesn't really even have much of a negative-emotion dimension. It's just a sort of amorality that tries to move with trends and is puzzled by even the idea that we would choose to do things because they are good or bad, because we think they will lead to better or worse futures, etc., rather than just because they'll make more money or because they're more technically satisfying, or even just because everyone else seems to be doing them. There's a lot of bad stuff going on; even more dangerous is the idea that we can't do anything about it; but more dangerous still is the idea that there's no reason to even think in terms of what we "should" do, and that we just have to accept our current position and trajectory without question.
• tim333 10mo ago
  Multiple options are inevitable. Internet connected beds, AI browsers and chatbots will be there for those who want them. Regular beds, browsers and people will still be around for the others. "refurbished plane engines to power their data centers" may get banned though.