Part I: Luxury Demands, Commodity Pocketbooks
Part II: "I'm just looking"
Part III: Introducing the new....
News is coming out hot and heavy that Apple is going to be releasing the 8th version of their popular iPhone. This has techies in a craze over the details and wonders that promise to make this version WAY more advanced than anything prior.
That's the buzz anyway, the reality is that cell phones have advanced remarkably little since the introduction of the first iPhone yet prices for them have increasingly skyrocketed.
This runs counter to other trends in tech, where prices seem to drop fairly rapidly. (Priced a 4K HDTV lately?) In fact, I will argue that tech is the one consumer area where Americans will pay a premium consistently for a brand. (Cell phones, not tech in general) Even personal computers lack 'traditional' brand loyalty.
We're seeing a raft of new tech items that sure look nice, but don't seem to DO a whole lot. Again, we've stagnated. When the biggest news about the iPhone 7 was that they eliminated the headphone jack you know something is amiss.
Apple has been the master of this, convincing people they need the new flashy toy without actually explaining what it does that's all that different, but other companies are gaining ground. Samsung (who currently makes the best cellphone in my opinion) has, to date, given me little reason to pay an increasing price for the S8 which doesn't appear to offer more in functionality than does my current S7.
Motorola is now offering extensions, which supposedly turn your phone into a 70 inch television screen, or a DSLR camera, but doesn't seem to have bridged the gap of providing a battery that will either watch an entire movie or take more than a handful of pictures. Browing the Internet on your phone? Good luck. Battery drain falls quicker than Hillary Clinton's Presidential hopes on election night.
The newest doo-dad is the so-called "digital assistant" who can play music for you, turn on the lights, order pizza (and pay for it, if you load a credit card into it's memory [which can be hacked]) and...what actually?
Yes, they're cute little dots, but I can't help but be reminded a little bit of the Dr. Who episode where all of the black cubes appeared on Earth. We already have invented AI that's created it's own language, and while I think the "SkyNet" doomsayers are being more than a little silly, it's not too hard to imagine a day where less of our day to day decisions are made by us rather than computes.
And that's the danger. We've already accepted a world where we allow politicians, marketers and big business to make many decisions for us, (Think about that, complete strangers that you're letting run your life) is it much of a stretch to think that computers running complex algorithms could going forward?
Unlike clothes or cars or foodstuffs, tech is sold to us with the promise that it will make our lives easier, that not having it makes one a Luddite and is akin to Ted Kascinsky sitting in that damn cabin slowly, inexorably going insane. And we're buying into it.
Possibly at the risk of everything else. Including our common sense. Which we've outsourced to the government, which is a problem I'll address in the next chapter.
