Has the world been moving forwards, or backwards?
Is technology improving?
Today, I decided to get my phone’s battery replaced instead of “upgrading” to a new phone. Although my phone is more than three years old, the phone is working well with software and security updates.
During the few hours of repair, I had to bring my older phone, which was iPhone X released in 2017 staying on iOS 16 compared to iOS 26 nowadays (due to Apple’s decision), but there are security updates. The phone works, although the battery is degrading. The only thing is I can’t enjoy the latest development of some apps, thus I can only use the older versions which may be less reliable and more buggy.
I chose to not upgrade my iPhone 13 mini to the latest phone models like iPhone 16e and even iPhone 17s, is that my current phone still does the job well, and more importantly, there are no more tiny phones like mine.
Buying a more powerful device won’t be better. On one hand, the hardware is already good enough for basic text and media. Better chips provide more possibilities like AI, which may or may not be necessary. On the other hand, software is the major concern as it is getting worse and worse (refer to Craig Mod’s article: Fast Software, the Best Software)!
Recently I talked to a sketcher who has his iPad Pro with powerful M chip having issues of crashing after updating Procreate to the latest v5.4 version, which brings new series of brushes but doesn’t combine the previous brushes into one library (meaning users have to switch between if they use new and old brushes together). Although the latest iOS/iPadOS 26 overall is great, there are still many annoying bugs which are not acceptable. (e.g. some alphabets are missing on the touch keyboard of my M2 iPad Pro.)
More than a decade ago, one of the main reasons I switched to Apple from Windows or Android, was the reliability: no crashes, no need to install third-party antivirus softwares, lightweight. Unfortunately not only Apple, but also majority of app developers, are so proud to add more and more (shiny new) features which make an app bloated, which, mostly, are useless. You may wonder why an email app like Gmail, can be 691.7MB nowadays; and Instagram can end up occupying your phone’s space as much as 2GB!
What do we want to do with technology?
Technology is not bad in nature, but it depends on how we use it. The main issue is that we just want technology to do everything for us, and we don’t mind give up our creativity and abilities too. We never imagine what we want to do with technology besides convenience.
The education system is to blame, as it trains us to conform to the giant machine in the capitalist society but not empowers us. We think creativity is limited to the ability to draw beautiful pictures, but not the essential skills of brainstorming and testing creative solutions in face of increasingly uncertain world.
Do we want our education (like the one in Finland, for example) to encourage us to explore and observe the unknown, and use our own hands to create something that helps us?
What we learnt, sadly, is “learned helplessness” that we have to accept the “fact” that we will eventually get older and thus weaker, and money is the only thing to fix our issues and help us settle: developing our professional reputation so that we are more able to purchase the best vehicles, permanent home, care home, medicine… and nowadays technology! The more certainty we pursue, the more uncertain our life will become.
Without learning to explore and understand the outside world on our own, technology is something we can’t live without, and we will end up spending on upgrading our devices endlessly to survive. We no longer want to train our observational, critical, creative and analytical skills, but let our social media and AI feed us without verifying the information we get. Even they are not false, they can be updating. Information can be interactive especially when many people know it. For instance, when YouTubers told us which places provide more job opportunities, many of us flock to there making job seeking more difficult. Do we notice that the world is more interconnected? Are we aware that it’s not we are getting old, but we let technology prioritise our lives?
We are more conservative now!
Thus we allow technology to reshape ourselves as well as the world view, reducing to the binary way of “either… or…”, either yes or no. We either embrace technology fully, or try to go back to the age before the invention of computers. When we have more immigrants, we have only two camps: one advocating diversity and one suggesting going back to white only, without thinking of the third and even fourth or more options, like trying to encourage people to involve more local cultures or develop universal values for everyone to follow to ensure harmony. It looks like the world is replacing meaningful conversations, discussions and mutual understanding with the rivalry between the only two (extreme) stances on social media.
We have spent hundreds of years on promoting fairness, equality, diversity and democracy, but by looking back to these twenty years, we are giving up that. We are more conservative in the name of “reform”, trying to kill democracy by democracy.
Don’t underestimate our own abilities as we can slowly, gradually improve ours. We can make use of technology to help us create something we can own, but not by handing over what we already have. Doing (and even slowly crafting) something that technology can do is not stupid. Do we make our choice? Do we believe that we can become more talented?
Do we upgrade ourselves?
