What technology has brought is choice and options:<p>A woman can choose to decouple having sex with getting pregnant.<p>A person can choose to live hundreds of miles away from their family yet still visit them every weekend.<p>A person can choose to move to a new country, halfway around the world, and still have their parents be able to see and converse with the grandchildren every night.<p>I can choose to talk to a person who speaks another language and have a computer translate for us.<p>On a more serious note:<p>I can choose to have my tooth decay treated without experiencing horrific pain.<p>A compound fracture is not an automatic sentence of death or lifelong severe disability.
A quote I think about often in a variety of contexts:<p>> It never gets easier you just get faster – Greg LeMond<p>In my HCI class we read about a paper talking about the tech that was supposed to save everyone from so much toil: the washing machine. It explored how we originally thought home appliance innovations would bring us leisure. Instead they’ve brought us more time to spend working. I wish I had the paper name at hand.<p>I think the quote and observation go hand in hand. Anything that could be used to provide ease, can equally be used to buttress performance and when humans have to choose between the two…the systems aren’t set up to reward those that choose the route of joy.<p>While I definitely enjoy programming more than I enjoy hand washing my own clothes. I wish I had less stress and more ease in my life.
If you want to and if you are aware of the dangers of what technology and modern work life can do, you can have a convenient and slow life today. Yes, you might be expected to constantly consume, but you don't have to. Throw out the TV, consistently ignore and switch off ads. I firmly believe that it is possible to enjoy the ease of modern technology life, and that drawbacks and not inherent.<p>Technology does make my life easier.<p>One aspect that I think does make life worse today is that families and friends tend to be distributed across larger distances -- too large to decide spontaneously to share a beer in a pub. It is more healthy and convenient to live close to the people you love to spend time with. But I am not sure this is technology's fault.
Before posting our vibes based opinions about how little time we all feel we have, I'd encourage everyone to first spend some time with the data on how Americans actually spend their hours: <a href="https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables.htm</a>, and in particular <a href="https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1-2022.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a1-2022.pdf</a>.<p>It will probably surprise many that even married couples who both work full time spend on average 2.9 to 3.6 hours per day on leisure and sports (vs 5.1 to 6.1 hours on work and 1.4 to 0.9 hours on child care). <a href="https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a7-1519.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/a7-1519.htm</a>
Only stressed people want to relax. Otherwise, we want to do more.<p>The changing-baseline effect is an artifact of a particular market competition. Housing prices went up as two-earner households increased faster than the housing supply. (i.e., women's entry into the workplace wasn't primarily a technological change) By contrast, secretary, illustrator and translator are hardly careers any more.<p>What technology (communications, computers, transportation) did was to make it possible for few people to effectively control many people and a lot of resources, without much of a tax for bureaucracy (coordination costs). Sometimes that's been good, sometimes not.<p>Today the driving feature of being busy stems from lacking pace control at work. Professionals used to be distinguished by owning their own standards and controlling the pace of work. Now even doctors and lawyers work in hierarchies with production processes. The only freedom today lies in being off the critical path (but still necessary), or using technology to go directly to consumers. Or just having resources.
I’m going to suggest people try washing their clothes by hand for one week and see how they feel about the technology convenience versus speed argument.
This entire article assumes that the surplus created by technological productivity is wasted.<p>After working as a bartender at a high end dockside restaurant during my younger years, I believe that the upper class and leisure class is larger than ever before. That automation spare time has been converted into massive wealth that will keep the political and business elite rich for generations to come.
I enjoyed the take of the wonderful children's book "Momo", by Michael Ende, that is based around this topic:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)</a><p>SPOILERS, kinda:
It talks about time thieves, that convince people to save time by offering devices that do things more efficiently. All this does is making society more sterile as people forgo time-wasting activities (such as socializing, art and recreation) to save more time, which is then stolen by these time-thieves.<p>I often think about this book, which feels very prescient, especially being written in 1973! I haven't ready it in a while but remember it being a beautiful and engaging read for any age.
The part about cash seems strange.<p>While there are certainly downsides to digital payments (or at least the current implementations of them) such as dependency on the banking system and surveillance there can be no doubt that electronic payments are more convenient.<p>The problem with cash is that there are two separate steps which need to performed in separate geographical locations:
1) Getting the cash (from an ATM or a bank)
2) Spending it<p>What people want to do is #2 but with cash they also have to spend time travelling to some place to do #1. You can optimise this by carrying large amounts of cash to reduce the frequency and time spent doing #1 but that has obvious downsides (like risk of theft)<p>Using electronic payments doesn't force anyone to "go faster" it just spares them from having to do "busy work".
Take writing, for example. If I were on a mechanical typewriter, when I make a typo, I'd have to reach for the white-out. Sure, the backspace key is faster, but it's also easier.<p>Flying somewhere is easier than walking there, not just faster.<p>Sure, I can write more, and travel more places, and they can wind up taking just as much work (or at least time). On the other hand, if I have <i>one thing</i> I want to write (my life work, say), then the computer makes my life both easier and faster.
This is why the Sabbath matters (see a recent HN post of an article from the New Yorker). If not for intentional, ritual rest, we will accelerate and innovate and accelerate.
Correct. It's a natural consequence of increased per-hour productivity, as implied by the Linder Theorem. You could always slow down if you want to - but you won't want to.<p>This is why you rarely hear about people moving from higher income to lower income countries. It's much rarer to meet someone who moved from the US to the EU than the other way around, and <i>really</i> rare outside of the big hitters (I'm the only resident American I know living in non-Helsinki Finland after 2 years here). Most people just don't want to pay the hidden price of a less frenzied life.<p><a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/the-harried-leisure-class.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/06/th...</a>
I fail to see how tech such as GPS doesn't make navigating easier.<p>Sure, you can argue that it makes it faster by finding a more optimal route, but you could have had an optimal route without GPS too, it was just harder.<p>In general you will still get there at around the same time, but it will have been easier on the brain to do it.
Completely disagree. Let's re-use the example in the article. You need to travel 300 miles. Which one is better? Live in the mid-1700 and work 8 hours a day for 12.5 days, or live in today and work 8 hours a day for 1.25 days?
I was recently thinking that the main issue with today is that an artist I like can produce a finite number of songs/albums/whatever and I quickly grow tired of hearing new things they produce because of how easy it is to listen to anything I want as quickly as I want. I don't even need to move the needle on the record. What's more, any sound slightly notable will likely show up in a meme video and remove itself from it's origins such that you cannot hear it again in the original context, e.g. the music from interstellar. So I'm left with the idea that ai can make an unlimited number of songs that sound like moby such that I never have to listen to the same song by moby twice because I can listen to a new song that sounds like moby every time I want to listen to moby. I'm not sure any of this makes it easier to get excited about music.
If people used all the freed-up time to only pursue leisure, progress would be slow. When we use freed-up time to do productive things or things that facilitate others being productive directly or indirectly, that speeds up progress. Some of that progress is good (medicine) and some bad (weapons, user-data driven advertising)
Faster <i>is</i> easier. I can search all the worlds' information. Much of it is only online, not in print. I can work without commuting. I can communicate with people without visiting them in person.<p>The thesis is asinine.
0 mention of advancements in medicine.<p>Do you think it was <i>easy</i> for families of the past to see half of their children die from what are now preventable causes?
Technology is massively overrated.<p>We build the same things cheaper, more generically and long, long after they were first discovered.<p>Electric cars were conceived in the 20s, Fusion in the late 1800s, face recognition in the 20s, ML in the 80s, ect.<p>Cars used to be a variety of iconic shapes and designs, now they are one homogenized platform.<p>Houses used to have a variety of rich architectural styles. Now all new builds have the same rendered concrete, flat walled, sharp edges, soviet style.<p>The internet has automated away our consciousness and conscience, people forgo long term memory of skills for rapid-response look-ups of trivial facts and submit to an endless cycle of similar concepts regurgitated.<p>Truly educational literature has been replaced with an ocean of devouring forms to fill out. Finding literature and written (let's be honest, typed up or generated) content that <i>gives</i> not takes, to the reader is getting rarer statisticaly.<p>Cinema is being replaced with lesser quality home theatres.<p>Dating has been replaced with a 'meat market' app.<p>Duty, heirarchy, order, meaning have all been drained out and people are wasting time on devices designed to mirror their consumption.<p>Computing and software has been subtly manipulated to force users to think as the software provider does, and to waste their time brutally, if they do not.<p>Agent Smith is more relatable everyday. It really became the machines' society when they did the thinking for us.<p>It is deeply sad to watch people waste conceptual power, like a dog returning to it's sick.
There's a post-modernist philosopher whose entire body of work basically boils down to this argument and being vaguely upset about it: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio</a>
The article is moronic. If not for technology, 99.9% or more of currently living humans would be dead/never born because it would be too hard for them or their ancestors to live.
> the global capitalist system doesn’t care whether or not you want to use the technology, or whether you believe it should be used to save your time. You will have to use it, and you’re not in charge of how it will be used systemically.<p>This hit really hard, as I am trying to de-google and to some extent de-amazon. It worms itself into your life to a point where it becomes extremely difficult <i>not</i> to use, and it's extremely helpless feeling.
The author only cries in the (pretty boring) style:<p>“We invented a knife and now things got fucking complicated! We have to deal with NEW OPTIONS like to cut the meal or to cut each other.”<p>:)
Tech doesn't make our lives faster evenly though; this is a form of the Baumol effect. If we could make 1 widget per hour a generation ago, but can make 10 widgets per hour today, the opportunity cost of an hour of leisure is 9 widgets higher.
Current consumer capitalism and the societies (+politics) that depend on it have painted themselves in a corner. Man cannot keep up with it. There are interesting times ahead of us.