The inconvenience of convenience

What Big Tech short cuts really cost us

“Created with AI”

I dunno.

Do any words make a heart sink quicker?

It’s like eating McNuggets, playing Candy Crush or taking a shit at work, isn’t it?

Like, okay….. if you *have* to do it, just do it quietly. Don’t brag - no-one needs to know.

You see, I think these folks bigging it up - this AI - think they sound modern, ahead of the curve.

Know what I hear?

“I can’t be arsed thinking of or valuing original ideas and I worship the god of money”

Just…..why?

I shake my head even more when people tell me they are ‘excited’ about it.

Really?

Perhaps it’s cause I grew up in the 80’s, I’m so over this obsession with tech.

I remember feeling that way about my Aunty’s new microwave. That ‘excitement’.

Their house always seemed a bit ‘space age’ to me because it was a split level affair over a few floors. They even had a dishwasher and a soda stream.

Clearly, ‘early adopters’…..

Walking into their kitchen felt like meeting the more reserved mates of the ‘Smash’ robots.

I remember asking my cousin Melanie to show me what it could do, this ‘Microwave’.

“Go on……can we put something inside it?”

“Yes……but you can’t put anything metal in it…..”

Ooh it didn’t like metal!  A gadget with preferences!

Bloody hell - this was the nearest I’d get to owning a Gremlin!

And so, with the curious caution of lifting a dog’s lips to view its teeth, I slipped something into it. Something suitably bland and ordinary……a potato……and waited, all ‘Tomorrow’s World’.

I watched in awe as it spun around on its lit pedestal, spud ballerina. Then, it dinged, I eagerly opened the door, and to my horror realised it had produced something soggier and vastly inferior to what I’d been used to.

This wasn’t the crisp skinned, fluffy fleshed delicacy I knew and loved!  This was a culinary crime! An uneasy oval of compressed mash in a disintegrating sweaty sack!

So why did people do it?

Why do people still do it?

Worship tech?

Oh yeah, that’s it,

‘Saving time’.

Convenience.

I remember now.

But the more this ‘convenience’ line is trotted out, I can’t help but wonder how we’re all benefiting from it.

If indeed, we are.

After all, the amount of ‘free time’ we now have, thanks to these meddling Metal Mickeys and ‘virtual’ heroes, you’d think we’d all be skipping about as merry little lambs, wouldn’t you?

Enjoying this ‘time’ we all have.

Y’know, time that we didn’t have before.

Apparently.

But is that what you see?

Cause it’s not what I’m seeing.

Clearly the trade off is not as cut and dry as we’ve been led to believe and maybe - just maybe - we actually lose more than we gain from these ‘advances’.

Time, can be easily quantified and held up as ‘wins’ on a checks and balance sheet.

Quality experience, however, cannot.

And as human beings, it’s up to us to recognise and honour its value.

Where we gain seconds, minutes and hours, we lose opportunities for innovation, perseverance and tenacity.

Making and enduring are the challenges that serve and satisfy us. They are experiential muscles we need to flex in order to grow.

Let’s take creativity as an example of how tech impacts it.

Have you ever been part of a buzz created by a group of musicians, artists or writers in the same place? Maybe you consider yourself to be one, or perhaps you’ve just been to an event or party and observed them interacting - talking about and showing each other things they’ve made.

To watch or participate is to become conscious of a dazzling, contagious fire. Each creator is steeped in and climbing on the passion of another. To behold someone in creative peak, inspires you to do better. It fills your head with the most glorious flames that engulf you.

So, consider the reverse of that.

Imagine being subjected to a barrage of mediocre. An on-tap shit-fest of words and images generated and arranged by some Robot Scrabble.

How that would affect you? Long and short term?

AI creations (compared to those made by people) are to me, a bit like seeing a zoo animal rather than a wild one.  However amazing the offering, I am aware I am experiencing something that has come about via unnatural circumstances, and as such, my ‘prize’ is unearned.  My brain knows it’s been cheated.

Another example of how tech has gnawed away at something wonderful, is apparent in writing with a pen or pencil. It is fast becoming a lost art.

Go to an antique fair. Look at the backs of postcards. See the elegant twirls and loops and enjoy a brief mesmerising love affair with the past. The beauty, care and individuality in the written script has little resemblance to the handwriting we see today, a skill ever eroded as people become more and more reliant on keyboards.

Originality is being further diminished with what we write too. So often we are given ‘prompts’ as answers, we have predictive text.

Life is becoming a menu at Hell’s Kitchen.

Each font, each word, each image a subtle suggestion, a nudge, when we are each at heart, unique.

As we embrace these time saving short cuts, we sublet our minds to a ruthless landlord.

Big Tech cares not for people.

Convenience and the creative process are at odds with each other. To truly create is to birth. It is not to generate. As any mother will tell you, child birth is inconvenient. It is a struggle, a passage, a tussle. And that’s what makes it work. Just as a newborn baby is held to light as miraculous after the pushes, so laboured ideas are held in souls. We acknowledge the weight of the journey as part of the panned gold.

The road to human demise and ultimately, incarceration is paved with convenience.

As a species we are having spark bred out of us as we clamour to this misguided belief that saving time is everything. Generation after generation, like herds of factory farmed animals, we have become a little less wild and a little more modified than the last.

Like cattle, we slowly give up a little of our lush tangible pasture to succumb to the ease of bleak yet functional prisons.

As we have need met by a soulless diet of TV dinners, online interaction and other shiny one stop shops, we sacrifice opportunities.

Proposed so-called 15 minute cities are a prime example of this.

As well as appealing to the age of ‘can’t be arsed’, they have the added ‘feel good factor’ bonus of some lame soundbite about helping the environment.

What’s not to love?

Um….it’s a SELF MADE JAIL, guys and you’re all checking yourself in like it’s the bastard ‘Holiday Inn’!

What will happen to shop assistants when everything is self service and online? What will become of both the job and other roles it serves?

To see services as compartmentalised functions separate to the human performing them is to misunderstand the value a person brings to the task. The value of a conversation, a smile, a wave, a nod.

If necessity is the mother of invention, what happens to our brains and bodies when we no longer need?

When all needs are met by crude imitations of the real thing?

I know the answer because I witness it.

We find we are even more lacking because the thing we crave most, is each other.

Let’s remember that life at its basic essence encompasses seasons of spark, incubation, birth, death.

That effort and waiting are normal and fruition is the reward of that.

When we reduce the effort, we dilute the prize. Whatever that prize may be.

True intelligence values human endeavour over efficiency, affordability and speed.

True intelligence knows that to bypass process does mankind a disservice as it gradually devalues human input.

True intelligence incorporates the body, emotions and mental health.  It knows that the motorway short cut means you miss the beauty of the scenic route.

True intelligence is natural. It is not artificial. It will never be replicated because nature is unrivalled as artist and inventor.

And we, are part of that nature.

So can we please start saying ‘No’ to quicker, cheaper, easier?

Instead, perhaps we can concentrate on systems that nurture and support real people, real jobs and appetite for wonder.

Let’s focus on ‘Better’.

Now, how intelligent would that be?