Bad Tech

What technology would you be better off without, why?

Daily writing prompt

There are a lot of technological breakthroughs that are just plain dumb. The big one that comes to mind for me right now is what we laughably call Artificial Intelligence. It is just a language model combined with a Google search. You ask a question, it searches the web, and then the language model summarizes the search results in a way that makes it look like an uncreative person wrote it out for you. That is not artificial intelligence. No need to worry about Skynet at all. We could definitely do without it.

Self driving cars are dumb too. They only work if you are okay with killing your neighbors. Once I would have thought that no one in their right mind would be okay with killing their neighbors in exchange for a tiny reduction in inconvenience. Then we lived through the Covid-19 pandemic and clearly learned otherwise. Self driving cars is a technology that is probably 10 years away from being perfected. Unfortunately it will still be 10 years away 10 years from now, and it will still be 10 years away 20 years from now. You see the trend? It’s dumb, we don’t need it.

I’d like to add chemical and biological and nuclear weapons to the list of technologies we don’t need, but unfortunately the research into these evil nightmares has also lead to some positives. That probe that flew by Pluto a few years ago? It had a nuclear powered drive system. We wouldn’t have that without the effin’ bomb. It’s disgusting and painful but that’s how it happened. It sucks but I don’t want to say we can do without nuclear power when it brings us to other worlds. Am I a hypocrite? Probably, yes. Shit.

A.I. though… that’s just plain dumb.