Peak Technology

 

Some time ago I had car trouble. My Mazda suddenly wouldn’t go beyond second gear, and because I live an hour’s drive from the city it was a big problem. So I visited my local garage, who passed me on to an automatic transmission specialist. He diagnosed that there was nothing actually wrong with the gearbox. Instead the sensor was malfunctioning, giving a faulty signal, and the car had gone into “limp-home mode”. Then he laughed and said, “Yeah these days we make most of our money fixing sensors. We hardly working on actual transmission systems.”

Limp-home mode. Great. I started brooding on how in my younger years there was no limp-home mode in my old Austin A35. You could crank start it if the battery died, and it could be worked on and parts replaced with a socket set and a jack in the backyard. You didn’t have to have expensive, fragile, electronic systems replaced, and it didn’t talk to you. Sure, someone might be able to use a bent coat-hanger to break into the car, but they couldn’t hack into it from a PC in Ukraine, and nobody could track where you were going or where you’d been.

“You sound just like a typical grumpy old bastard,” I said to myself. But over the following weeks and months I thought about whether all technological progress has been “good” – in a way that admittedly needs defining – and I came to two conclusions.

Conclusion No. 1

For every type of technology there is a time when it reaches its peak performance, after which performance declines due to factors such as safety, environmental friendliness, supposed “efficiency” or planned obsolescence. I call this peak technology.

To clarify what I mean I invite you to think about any of the devices and technologically enabled services that you use – from refrigerators and stoves, to cars, phones, vacuum cleaners and televisions, bank machines and postal services – that don’t perform as well now as they did in the past. A car fanatic might have their idea of the perfect car, which they now feel guilty about because of its petrol consumption; or a chef might reminisce about that gas stovetop that worked flawlessly, every time, for 15 years and never “decided” to cut out, but is now considered dangerous. And the old person might sadly recall chatting to the check-out ladies at the supermarket, the nice young man at the bank, the helpful librarians, the old man who pumped petrol, and the postie who delivered mail six times a week. Now they talk to no-one, because it is all automated and robots perform these functions.

“Oh my God!” you will be saying to this tale of woe. “I suppose you want people to ride around in horses and carts, watch black-and-white TV and have bakelite dial phones. And shut down the internet! Ha!” This leads to the second conclusion.

Conclusion No. 2

Most people are in the grip of technological determinism. This is the assumption that technological change is both inevitable and good, and that to resist it in any way is, well, akin to wanting to keep driving horses and carts after cars were invented. The concept of technological determinism explains the bizarre phenomenon (thankfully now fading) of people lining up all night to be the first to get the latest iPhone. It explains the lack of real consumer choice (we will now all use tiny phones, and like it; we will now all use big phones, and like it), and the fact that nothing works very well anymore because of the tweaks that have been made to ensure the technology is safe and environmentally friendly, with a small carbon footprint and some vague idea of sustainability. But you’ve got a two-year warranty, haven’t you?

Am I saying all technological change is bad, and that we should go back to living in caves and cooking over an open fire? Or am I a Luddite who wants to stop the progress of automation? No, and no. What I want you to consider is the possibility of a peak in performance in a type of technology. This idea allows for the possibility that some things are at their peak now, or that some things will reach their peak in the future, but also that some things may have reached their peak in the past. This last idea is the revolutionary one, and it is the one I want you to wrestle with.

What does this all mean?

It means that people should think about and have a say, as consumers and citizens, in the direction of technology. Do you like the idea of self-drive cars? Many people respond, “Hell no, but it’s going to happen so why fight it?” How do you like working 24/7, because your phone is always with you and you’re expected to be reachable? “I hate it, but if you want to cut the deal, keep the client, stay on top, people have to be able to contact you.” Do you like online shopping for clothes? “Not at all, you never know what you’re going to get or whether it will fit, but I can’t leave work to go from shop to shop, trying on clothes, so I just order at work in my coffee break.”

What these stereotypical replies show is that people feel that technological change cannot be resisted, and also that society changes its structure and function in response to new technologies, such that it becomes difficult or impossible not to use them. It is impossible to not be part of the system, so you have to have them, you have to use them. Try being a functioning citizen without apps for parking or ubers, without online payments for bills, without a phone to control your Bluetooth speakers or the streaming platforms on your TV. Banks are phasing out cheques, and the ability to make cash transactions is reducing. It’s not surprising that people embrace technological determinism because it goes hand in hand with cultural determinism, the idea that this is how we do things now.

Everybody grumbles about some small aspect of technology, from their daughter meeting people on Tinder and their son playing Fallout 76 all night, to the way their car beeps at everything  and talks too much. But too few people see the big picture: that both cultural and technological determinism are driven by huge, seemingly unstoppable mega-companies such as Google and Apple, who imperiously dictate to us what kind of society we will live in and how we will live and interact with each other. Change means buying another one, which means money. It is also driven by governing bodies telling us what is safe, and what we will and won't be saved from. We don't get a vote. We don't get a say. And I, for one, don’t like it. 

Harry Wiren