I love articles that completely dispel the idea of singularity - that point out that the feeling of our age that things are changing too quickly has been around for a very long time.
It doesn't dispel the idea that things are changing too quickly. It reinforces that we are engaged in a never ending battle against exploitation and enslavement.
Yeah, I think with all major technological advancements we end up with logistic "S-curve" type growth, with a steep rise followed by an eventual plateau. At the start it can look like exponential growth heading toward a singularity, but that's just not realistic and growth always slows down and levels out eventually. Based on the degree and timescale though the two cases my feel pretty indistinguishable for individuals.
I think what has changed the most about our relationship with technology now a days compared to prehistory is the overall incentives for technology changing. It used to be technology had to actually improve something to be adopted. A bow and arrow was superior to throwing a stone, so it was adopted on merit. Sowing seed and animal husbandry was superior to migrating around seasonal harvest from uncultivated flora and game, so it was also adopted on merit. No one was marketing this shift.
Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his ingots.
A multitude of successful cryptocurrency rugpulls has shown that technology can indeed be ouroboric, with no actual social benefit.
I do get GP's broader argument, that every generation shakes its fist at the cloud, and we're no different (though this time, we do have a "cloud" to shake our fists at!)
However, your argument resonated with me. Growing up, I observed that newer tech was often superior (e.g. DOS --> Windows) and competing by delivering superior value to the end-user. Of late, it feels like companies are reading the financial tea-leaves and competing by delivering increasing gains to Wall Street.
If a product isn't better for someone, people don't buy it. Marketing counts for something, but quality is still the most important factor in the success of a product. It just may not be the quality axis that's important to you, so it can seem arbitrary.
What would you call cost cutting then? Clearly we are talking about the same things if we are talking about optimizing for shareholder value. I think its not controversial to see how consumer value has plummeted on a lot of goods especially in light of the idea of planned obsolescence and having generally more disposable products to sustain a black hole of a business model.
