The Rise of Shit-Tech: Why Technology’s Promises Miss the Point
As someone forced to use technology for a living, there’s one really obvious thing about all the new software and technology coming out that I’ve noticed over the past few years:
All this shit sucks.
Lately, it’s been “AI” technology that swings big on promises and misses hard on deliverables.
Sure, you can use it as a jumping-off point, and this may save time commercially on the things you hate doing. I’m thinking about things like background removal for photos, generating some alt text for an image, and summarizing a meeting. No one wants to do these tasks if there’s a better way.
But what are the promises? That AI will create illustrations and logos; songs and books; drive you around and cook you meals. These are such lofty goals that they easily miss the fucking point of why people are excited by models and autonomous things.
People want to make the shitty things stop so they can concentrate on the important stuff. They stuff they want to do.
By now, even most non-tech people have heard the phrase “move fast and break things.” Introduced by everyone’s favorite three-kids-in-a-trenchcoat turned human, Mark Zuckerberg, the idea is that it’s better to move agility and fix things later.
For a while, this worked. It’s similar to the slightly different phrase, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” (This is yet another example of tech taking something that was already around a putting a different spin on it. Disruption!)
While arguably true, to implement either of these rules in your work or life, you need to know when to employ them. They’re like the rule of thirds in composition or color theory. If they help you get where you need to be, great. But they aren’t the end-all-be-all rule.
Using any guiding principle intended to assist as an unbreakable guideline is what amateurs pretending to be professionals do. Because fast growth at all costs is the name of the game, it’s easy to latch onto these things and not think. It’s a trade of short-term gains against something that will last.
Software & Tech Solve the Wrong Problems
If new technology and software solve any problems at all, it’s solving its own need just to exist. In the best-case scenario, they solve some novel problems a few people have. More often than not, they are just proofs of concept that they think they can hawk for a few bucks.
Because the tech space is so insular with people who work all the time and have little experience in the real world the rest of us live in, they’re often solving only problems they have.
As an example, there are currently products being developed to cook for you. I’m not talking about the overpriced delivery boxes that are more expensive than getting your own groceries, but actual machines.
Who would want this? Probably the type of people who are so involved in their work that this “time” seems like a waste. Sure sounds like a tech-bro problem to me.
These applications are so niche, especially with younger generations cooking more than ever, that it boggles my mind that anyone would think that this use case is scalable. Novel, sure. But scalable? A huge amount of people love cooking.
Do you know what most people hate? Cleaning dishes. It’s why we invented dishwashers and chemical cleaning fluids are a vast industry. We don’t need the personal robot chef, we need the personal fucking robot dishwasher. We need the laundry robot.
We’re at the point where we’re solving problems no one needs solving and ignoring the ones that people would seriously shell money out for. Many times, this comes with some huge worse-case scenarios as a byproduct.
Cryptocurrency solves a lot of problems around moving money without the banking system, but it also is an obvious haven for people who need to launder money, transfer funds to facilitate crime, and scam people. AI image generation can make a funny image, but they’re ultimately so sterile that you can spot them from a mile away: all the while facilitating misinformation or generating things like revenge porn.
Yes, any tool or advancement in technology facilitates these kinds of things. The problem isn’t the cliché “we didn’t stop to think about if we should do something,” it’s that we thought out the problems that actually help regular people, instead of making more for them.
The Cost of Shit-Tech and The Fast Buck
So now we’ve got a lot of fancy things that are pushed out way too early in their development. And, because there needs to be profit, we get the privilege to pay for the ability to be a QA team to corporations essentially.
The promise of “we’ll fix it later” is, if not fine, at least tolerable when it’s low stakes. Maybe my aforementioned robot dishwasher misses the spoons because of a bug. Fine, I’ll wash the spoons. Not a huge deal.
It’s entirely different when your car plows into a kid or you’re trapped in a flaming mobile Musk-coffin.
But I’d argue there’s also a mid-stakes cost. No matter how much blood someone in tech wants to squeeze out of the stone of their day, every human has the same amount of time in the day to do something. It’s how we apply those hours that matter.
The amount of time we’re wasting on the people on shitty AI assistants or reinventing the sailboat is fucking staggering. There are massive efforts to put out half-baked products we don’t really need and ideas when there are many actual problems to solve. But why pitch virtual reality headwear as something that can help you translate and communicate with people while traveling when we could make Zoom meetings worse!
This is what I call the shit-tech sector. Shit-tech is a technology that solves existing problems that don’t really need to be solved.
While it could be diverted somewhere else, the point of shit-tech isn’t actually to solve problems but to be as non-viable as possible to sell quickly. If your shit-tech creates more problems, all the better, as we’ll just roll out more shit-tech to solve the problems we’ve made.
That’s how the shit-tech shitball keeps itself moving.
At some point, people are going to cease to care about all these kinds of things and we’re going to see a massive shift in what is actually made led by people who actually understand what needs to be made, intead of just making anything with little thought.
When is that going to happen? Fucked if I know.
But I’d be willing to bet that some engineer who’s been laid off because they’re building some crappy piece of software that doesn’t do anything to help anyone may just figure out they really hate to do the dishes.
