“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
Effective technology takes our most time-consuming tasks and moves them into the background so we can focus on other important things. We can see this happening on the civilization level with the infrastructure we’ve built to get inexpensive food, water, energy, and transportation.
But it also works on the personal level. Whether it’s a high-quality dishwasher or well-designed personal-finance software, technology is our primary tool for saving time and redirecting our attention.
But not all technology is successful at this. The power of technology is abstraction and a poor abstraction is worse than having no technology at all. Case in point: a smart light-bulb that never saves you enough time to recover the time you spent setting it up.
Simon Sarris has a great post describing some of these issues:
“Many modern devices (and apps) really excel at squishing tradeoffs into weird shapes. They are better thought of as little imps that sneak into homes and ask for more and more of your attention. They want to gently claw at your eyes and ears. They want to put notifications on your phone and remind you that you need to interact with them, or buy more of them, so that they might become even more convenient.”
Simon Sarris, Careful Technology
Much of our technology has small hidden costs. A new app on your phone, an audible hum in the background, a recommended cleaning every six months, recurring manual software updates, monthly emails in your inbox, increased risk of a breaker trip, reduced counter-top space, parts that need replaced, a small monthly fee, a new username and password, batteries to recharge, parts to recycle, etc, etc.
Each cost seems small but with enough bad technology you face death by a thousand cuts. You lose time, peace, and other more difficult-to-quantify things, like “the cozier feeling of home.”
We have to be discerning about the technologies we let into our lives. I’m tired of technology that trades one set of problems for another. I want that technology you don’t have to think about.