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AI Is Becoming a Band-Aid over Bad, Broken Tech Industry Design Choices
(www.scientificamerican.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I think the AI part of the article title is a bit of a clickbait, from the way I read it, the article was primarily focused on the reduction of usability in tech products due to the "growth oriented" mindset of tech companies adding more and more bloated features and ads for more profit, for which AI is a part of.
The "everything looks like a nail" part of tech oriented people that I could never understand: I've known people, real, very smart, people, who thinks more tech will solve every single problem in the universe by predicting then replacing the human with the omnipotent big data and machine learning; If the problem wasn't solved, that's because there wasn't enough data for the model and you simply need to gather more data and add more tracking to everything, instead of looking for a simpler, low tech solution.
I'm frustrated, because (correct me if I'm wrong) this kind of mindset seems to be common in the tech industry, the idea that automation and improvements in technology is ultimately imagined as means to eventually achieve a substitute for humanity in the form of the almighty dollar, instead of used to help humanity achieve more with less. I would expect it from companies, but not from real people.
It's common in a lot of "industries". Ever notice how priests always think we need more god?
If you stop thinking about it as cause->effect, and just as good/bad, it makes sense: tech is good, things are bad, solution: more tech. Things even worse, oh hod, it's worse than I thought, we need even more tech, even faster!
This mindset is carried "techno-wizard"