We Have Passed Peak Tech
My old Nissan Silvia (200sx)
We have reached peak tech. I don't mean to say that technology itself has plateaued, but rather that its utility to mankind has. More than plateauing though, in reality technology not only does not improve our lives, but in fact enslaves us or at best dulls us and robs our attention.
Technology itself is not good or bad. Weaponry can be a force for evil, but it is the wielders' actions which are the determinant.
Iatrogenics
Definition: (of a disease or problem) caused by medical treatment or by a doctor
Peak Tech is the point at which new technology ceases to improve our lives, irrespective of the wielders' intentions, and instead diminishes and even harms us. I acknowledge the breakthroughs in technology, such as travel: my grandfather came on a boat to Australia over many weeks, a journey which now takes less than 24 hours.
Modern emergency surgery has saved countless lives. Yet, as Nassim Taleb argues in his book Antifragile, many modern systems suffer from iatrogenics: harm caused by well-intentioned intervention. Doctors should first do no harm (i.e. the Hippocratic Oath). In a life or death situation, a doctor cannot do much additional harm, and so intervention is suitable and even preferable. It is this standard that we must apply to tech.
Chinese Car Handle
From 2027, China will ban hidden car door handles. For the most part, regulation - much like technology - suffers from the law of unintended consequences. A marginal - and subjective - improvement in aesthetics with respect to car handles resulted in a number of fatalities (due to electric failure as outlined in the article).
I remember modifying old Japanese cars with my best mate when I first moved out of home. They were simple, robust, and we understood how they worked.
"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity" — Terry A. Davis, Creator of TempleOS
Simple is beautiful. Unfortunately, the hidden door handle example is just one of technological impertinence lying in plain sight. In the more trendy, insufferable areas of most major international cities now, a visit to the restaurant might be met with a QR code menu. While this unnecessary invasion of technology at the dinner table may not result in death, it does result in the hideous and yet common sight of couples or families sitting staring at their phones, where once we would have broken bread and bonded with those close to us.
The current conflict in Iran has shown us the asymmetry of warfare, and that simplicity often prevails. Cheaper one-way missiles are a force equalizer when compared to the technologically magnificent American fighter jets, which necessarily must return to base.
Informational Oversupply
The ability to combine the supply of cheap electronics with AI code generation and AI agents represents a uniquely formidable opportunity to further introduce inefficiencies and technological friction into our lives.
Recently, in a discussion at work, a colleague was describing to me the new AI system to be implemented using Openclaw that would leverage a sequence of AI agents, along with a master agent to parse the historical sales inbox. What is the benefit, I asked, rhetorically. The rhetorical tone was lost on my ultra-nerdy co-worker who then began describing in great detail a highly complex and fragile sequence of AI agent interactions which would provide a "highly refined output".
Of course this "output" cannot be trusted. It would need to be verified. So what is the point? All that this system has achieved is a hyper complex search bar that doesn't return a reliable result. In many ways, the original solution (a search bar with a basic parsing algorithm) was more robust, cheaper, and more intuitive. Most importantly, it was accurate.
Data is so plentiful that it is in essence no longer valuable. Our minds are polluted with endless and ineffectual informational slop, about wars in far off places, or price movements down to the millisecond, that is traded by machines far too fast for a human to compete with. Now, the great investors are those who exhibit the exact traits that our societies so loathe: patience, wisdom, inaction.
Software
In finance, things need to be precise. In software, less so, in fact the existence of so-called bugs is part of the game. Today, the state of software requires more tolerance for bugs than ever before. Code is now cheap, much like AI generated social media slop which pervades and destroys the internet. Even when I was a kid, the tax accounting software my father would use was all wrapped up into a binary of less than 100mb, and yet was faster, lighter, and more reliable than modern web-based SaaS apps.
Modern AI generated code enables the existence of programmes that would otherwise have never existed, further polluting our technological lives.
Peak software was years ago. I wrote this in NeoVim, which is a fork of Vim, which in turn was a fork of vi from more than 30 years ago. Yet today, despite the fact that free and open-source solutions have existed for years, people still opt to subscribe to bloated web-based paid software solutions that do not work without an internet connection - once again, more fragile, more complex, with only marginal benefit - or even net negative - impact over existing solutions.
What is the point?
As AI models evolve, especially as it pertains to context awareness, humans will be relegated further into doom scrolling subscribers of AI generated slop. Humans are being replaced, and no job, especially no white collar job is safe. Anyone and everyone is vulnerable to being replaced by AI.
I don't just mean software nerds either. I am referring to lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, analysts, translators, data scientists, receptionists, consultants. Any job which requires a sequence of logical decisions is now implementable by AI agents. Yes, these agents are terrible, they pale in comparison to humans. But our societies don't reward exceptional talent, they have killed architecture, beautiful streets, beautiful homes. Our societies reward the mean, the average, they reward low cost, cheapness, which will eventually break, unlike our ancestors who built structures to last generations, and in some cases thousands of years.
Via Negativa
Loneliness, smartphone addiction, erosion of family and community are visible everywhere we look and with many souls with whom we speak. Much of this can be attributed to the pervasiveness of technology and the pointlessness of modern work and society. To the unnatural lives we live, where we go to special buildings to physically exert ourselves - gyms - and talk to people over mobile devices instead of the human sitting right in front of us.
If there is any silver lining to all of this, it is the fact that most of this work will be exposed as entirely replaceable, allowing us to liberate ourselves from corporate servitude. And so I will end with one last lesson from Nassim Taleb, namely via negativa, meaning improvement not by adding things, but by removing what does not work.
We are beyond the point that technology enhances our lives. All of the technology that allowed me to write and publish this article existed decades ago. Today, technology introduces complexity, fragility into our systems, and cheapens, dulls and distracts our attention.
AI is the final culmination of this journey, and I hope it will elicit a new dawn in human consciousness through the repudiation of technology which harms us more than helps us.
References
[1] Chinese Hidden Car Handles
[2] Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Taleb, 2012