Earlier tonight, my metamour @cathoderaydude wrote an excellent piece about a subject we've chatted about a couple times at home: Gravis's thesis that human technology has already developed all the consumer electronic devices as human beings are ever likely to need. There's pocket devices, tablet devices, laptop devices, desktop devices. The last really important new sort of device, the smart phone, is now over twenty years old, and even that was more like an elaboration on the older notion of a "personal digital assistant". What has there been since then that's really new—a brand new consumer device that offers some completely novel way for a human being to interact with a personal computer, however small? Watching the technology industry flail around with things like AR eyeglasses and "smart rings" and other gimmicky wearables, none of which seem to have much audience beyond the usual gang of elite professionals who jump on every technological bandwagon no matter how inane, I'm tempted to agree with Gravis: maybe we really have exhausted the space of useful consumer electronic devices.
I don't want to agree, I admit. I want to cling to a vague faith in unknown possibilities. I tell myself: if a truly new device comes along, won't it be something that nobody guessed ahead of time? And while some of the canonical consumer devices that we've got feel like they've arrived at their final overall forms—it's difficult to imagine a tablet computer, for example, being much different from existing ones apart from details and refinements—other devices feel weirdly unfinished to me. Are we really stuck with featureless rectangles for phones now? The personal computer most especially feels like it's stuck halfway between a hobby kit and a finished consumer device, and I'm not convinced that Apple's approach is the only approach to making a desktop computer that's more like a polished, professional bit of instrumentation.
But I suspect that Gravis is mostly correct, which means that the real challenge now when it comes to consumer technology is improving accessibility. If we basically have all the devices we're likely to need, then the new mission ought to be making them maximally easy to use, and ensuring that as many human beings as possible have a fair opportunity to benefit from the technology. We have the computers and the smart phones and so forth, veritable miracles of technology, and yet they're deeply unpleasant to use and too expensive for a great many people to own and operate—despite the infuriating social assumption, prevalent in techbro circles, that the landscape of high technology is somehow democratic and "everyone" has modern devices and high-speed Internet now.
Really the situation isn't much different when it comes to older-fashioned technology, like trains or better kitchen appliances: we have the technology already, but not enough people get to use it. Needless to say, though, the current landscape of corporate technology is hostile to prioritizing accessibility. It's more profitable to focus product development on an privileged upper crust of the human population, the folks with all the money to spend on new toys, and who have been conditioned into accepting increasingly gimmicky technology that's badly designed and unreliable as the price of innovation. Meanwhile, the reactionary political beliefs of the technocrats supply them with handy excuses for keeping technology expensive and inaccessible.
I can think of one other curious possibility, when it comes to this question of where innovation ought to be happening, and that's the possibility of abandoning the notion of discrete consumer devices in favor of direct symbiosis between humanity and high technology—i.e. modification of the body with devices designed to work seamlessly with organic life. Cyborg tech, in other words. The contemporary techbro culture, from what I've glimpsed, seems to have some painfully ambivalent feelings about such notions; there's a lot of "my body is a temple" sentiment thinly disguised as rational concern for losing one's humanity by technological modification. And yet there's a lot of excitement for Neuralink and presumably for other implantable devices...maybe someone could explain to me exactly what sort of cyborg stuff the techbros want, vs. what they fear.
~Chara of Pnictogen
