Technological Optimism vs. Pessimism
Maybe let’s not shoot down an idea before it has been properly explored when the first difficulty arises.
If you read tech blogs like The Verge you will quite easily get an impression that most tech being built is garbage or pointless. Some tech blogs seem to tap into the fairly basic human sin of reveling in other people’s failures. New tech is an interesting field but maybe the criticism of the said tech blogs is not completely unjustified. However, I think there’s more to it than that.
People keep asking me why I’m into smart home technologies and why I have blanketed my home with Google Home devices when they clearly have tons of problems. I wouldn’t necessarily say that someone calling these devices not-very-good or not-very-necessary is wrong. Smart home or Google Home are perfect examples of technologies I’m referring to in this article. Smart home technology is something that is strictly not needed and mostly flawed but extremely interesting and, when it works, eye opening. (I will be writing about my smart home setup in a separate article.)
Being part of “it”
Tech moves fast. The coolest new things, at any given time, are not ready for the larger audience. New ideas are often rushed to the market together with tons of issues, bugs and not-very-well-thought-out user interfaces. Some companies take more time to polish their ideas before going mainstream, like Apple, while some other prefer testing their ideas in the open much earlier, not unlike Google.
Judging an idea based on the downsides surfacing in the first few uses doesn’t feel productive. Personally, I don’t think the bugs and problems of a given tech are interesting. New ideas, even if not perfectly implemented yet, are exciting. Sometimes the advancements and benefits of new technology are clearly visible but often you are forced to elaborate a bit. “Where could this go once perfected?”
Currently, there are couple of hot topics that are being discussed a lot: The already-mentioned smart-home tech and secondly: foldables. I don’t know what I feel about foldables yet but it would be foolish to dismiss the whole idea based only on what we have seen so far. The tech industry is not very good at jumping to 0 to perfection without intermediate steps and iterations. We have to use those initial attempts to learn what works and what does not. Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
To understand the potential you must live with the new tech. It is very easy to dismiss Google Home / Assistant based on the failures of it not understanding something very simple. But if you live with the system, connected to other for-now-flawed systems, you very quickly start to see the potential, the future. Understanding the good parts is the key.
Tolerating inconvenience
Often, seeing the future requires higher tolerance for inconvenience. Switching the lights of with a traditional light switch is probably the most convenient, effortless and failsafe way to do it. A single failure from Google Assistant trying to do the same. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” can make your blood boil. Fair questions like “why are we doing this?” and “what is the point of having this tech?” arise from very small percentage of failure.
This is the price to pay to see what it could be. In cases of immature tech forgiving failures is not fanboyism, it’s hope. I believe Google will able to solve the small issues to understand me sometimes or responding to me in a wrong room (turning lights off in the bathroom instead of bedroom). These are solvable, short-term problems. The bigger picture is much wider and that is what I’m interested about.
To get to the big picture you sometimes have to tolerate the inconvenience of the smaller issues.
Optimism doesn’t mean abandoning skepticism
Reading the above, you’d be forgiven thinking that I just like everything new no matter how awful. No. You can be both, optimist and sceptic. I don’t buy into marketing very easily (at least consciously). I don’t think every idea is a good. Not everything need to be explored in person to see the flaws in the bigger picture. Skepticism is good (in fact, that’s what we need much more in the current word).
Not everything is for you
Many ideas feel idiotic and you don’t see any point at having them. That doesn’t mean that there is no merit in the idea. Not everything is targeting you. Many things might make sense in context that you didn’t think about or with people with very different habits than you. Framing all tech in the closed frame of reference of “me” is likely going to lead in to mistakes in the evaluation said tech.
I see this a lot on twitter. Things like “I’ll never want a foldable phone” seems to often be written with the subtext of “I don’t want it and anyone who does is an idiot”. Let’s just let others have their fun. Maybe you just have missed a use case?
TL;DR
If you work in tech, you probably have at least some level of interest in new things coming out. Things move fast and we need to adapt. I feel that part of all this is to experience the new tech and give it a chance. Tolerate the inconvenience and think where the tech is going once the immediate problems are eventually solved. But be skeptical and critical. Demand perfect future.
