> Of course nowadays days I see the downsides of these devices and we're getting to a point where the cons outweigh the pros, but back when I bought the first smart phone (I guess in 2012 or so, I was relatively late to the party) it felt like a leap into the future compared to what I had before.
I know a lot of people have a troubled relationship to their phone, but this is really surprising to me. Would I want to go back to a world where I can't conveniently contact people, navigate the world, look up anything I want to know in an second, and set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer? Not even a little bit.
The last time I personally felt the excitement the author describes was probably with the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, but unfortunately that product went nowhere.
High quality eBikes are pretty amazing: I have nearly 4000 miles on one of ours, and nearly all of those are replacing car trips around town, including most of our grocery shopping.
While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.
Last year I purchased an e-scooter (Hiboy X300)to compliment my car. I used it so much, I accidentally let my car rot into disrepair. The e-scooter is great, but it is quite limited in what you can carry (only what you can put in a backpack). Instead of getting another car for the things that I can't really use the scooter for, I got an acoustic, belt driven bike :) (the Priority 600). I went acoustic and belt driven specifically to compliment the shortcomings of the e-scooter (other than the carrying capacity, which any bike is an improvement on), in that I don't have to worry about it failing in any weather that I throw at it, rain, snow or shine. There is no battery to get too cold and no electrical system to get too wet.
Had I known I were going to be getting rid of my car, an e-bike would have definitely been a better value. I feel lucky that things worked out the way that they did though - having both an e-scooter and an acoustic bike has been great!
My eBike comes with a big basket and a bag that slots into it that can carry a ton of stuff. I do most of our family's grocery shopping with it. A huge upgrade from a backpack.
I'm getting old, but it seems like we're all more ambivalent about new tech. Maybe I'm projecting, but we don't expect tech to be the solution to human problems as much as we used to. The boundless optimism about the World Wide Web has putrified into techno-pessimism for at least half of us.
I feel the same way. I think the difference is that new tech used to be an improvement to your life. New tech is there simply to suck life (your attention) and money away from you.
There are exceptions of course, But the general trend is worrying.
I've been playing Project Zomboid with my friends. It's an isometric survival game set in 1993 in a fictional area around Louisville, Kentucky. It has VHS tapes, TV and radio broadcasts, ham radio, CDs, and landlines in it. So far in my playing experience, there's no real internet component.
There's some sort of disease outbreak that turns people into zombies and society starts to collapse. Eventually things like the power grid and water/sewage infrastructure break down. Food rots. Gasoline runs out. It's basically guaranteed that you and your teammates will die in this game.
Even after living through a pandemic and all of the shit that came with it, and despite the grim atmosphere of the game, I still miss the time period that this game symbolized. I know I was only a child during the 90s and the era had its real problems, but there were good things about it and the state of technology at the time that have gotten worse in the decades since.
It was a time when media was a physical good and had meaning, when there wasn't a constant deluge of information, when my attention was less valuable than advertisers have made it today, and there was, at least for the majority of society, a shared informational reality.
That's all gone and there are massively powerful interests working to make sure it stays gone.
What used to be a super computing center now fits in my pocket and runs on batteries. I haven't tried, but I'm reasonably sure my phone can emulate a Cray-1 at faster than the original.
I used to be like that. I would pore over feature matrices in Computer Shopper ads and pick out stuff I couldn't afford and wasn't going to buy.
Then, about 7 years ago I realized that for the first time, I was more or less happy with the tech in my life. My computer was good, I liked my phone, my tablet, and my ereader. I had a good TV and stereo I used all the time. The appliances in my home are reliable and work well. The tools I use in my garage and yard are all fine. With Android Auto or Car Play (I've used both) even my car felt like it had crossed some threshold of being good enough that I didn't really have the itch for something better.
I had been working full time for 30ish years and had accumulated a lot of stuff that makes my life better and there really isn't much more that I want and certainly nothing that I need. When Christmas rolls around and people want gift ideas for me, it's hard for me to think of things. My favorite thing in the world is to have a few days off and no plans or commitments and I can sort drill bits, change my guitar strings, watch a movie, or take a nap.
Tech is no longer exciting to me because I no longer feel a connection between tech improvement and world (or personal life) improvement.
I used to read sci fi for the wonder, but now I read it with dread, for Chekov's Gun is a Torment Nexus, and if you introduce a Torment Nexus in Act 1 of a sci fi dystopia, it will be fired IRL by act 3.
Deeper lurks a more chilling question: what, on a dying planet run by fascists, should I do with my time?
I remember my grandparents making this exact same complaint: All of the new technologies during their younger years were amazing and improved the world. All of the technologies that came along in their later years were only complicating life after they had settled into comfortable routines.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
But look at the rate of it. How many new exciting things between 1950 and 1960? Color TV, jet airplanes, transistors, computers, early programming languages, nuclear power, artificial satellites, polio vaccine, credit cards, microwave oven, Xerox. How many new exciting thing between 2010 and 2020? AI and Netfix?
Transistors existed between 1950 and 1960. But they didn't really set the world on fire until the 1970s.
Computers existed in the 1950s, but they didn't explode into businesses until the IBM 360 series, and they didn't go into homes until the 1970s, and not in volume until the 1980s.
Xerox existed, but didn't explode until the 1970s.
And so on. It is decades from something being invented, to commercial availability, to widespread commercial use. And only when it becomes widespread does it change the world.
So I claim that the "revolutionary" part is when something already existing becomes widespread and applied. That was (in my previous examples) electricity in the 1920s and 30s, and personal computers in the 1980s and 90s. They already existed. But when they became widespread and used for everything, that's when the world changed.
So, what was that in the 2010s? I would say cell phones. Yeah, they existed before. But now everyone had them, which meant that everyone could be reached all the time, and everyone could take pictures, and read the news, and search the net, and watch sports, and listen to music, all the time, no matter where they were. That changed the world, or at least society, quite a bit.
What is it for the 2020s? It could be AI. That is, plausibly, exploding. If it continues to do so, it is likely to change everything. mRNA vaccines may become a thing that changes everything, at least as much as the polio vaccine, but we are not there yet - at this point it's still a maybe. SpaceX lowering the cost to orbit is a big deal. Starlink may be; I'm in the US, where internet rarely depends on satellites, so I'm not in a good position to judge that one.
Don't feel that's it at all. Let's be more specific instead of just "tech" since that can be so many things.
I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.
And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.
What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.
Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.
So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.
You do have to move your focus for sure. Gadgets used to be cool, but now you'd have to look at SpaceX or Stoke for space, and all the crazy ambitious fusion startups, or Quaise. Those are the ones I'm tracking at least..
I used to not be excited about the next consumer tech gadget or the next JS framework, but I am now pretty excited about transforming new tech now (AI, energy, space, etc).
I'm excited about self driving cars for aging boomer and drunk mobility. Most consumer tech seems to be pure agitation and slop. Can't seem to think that ways to engage media is getting better (paid streaming now with ads etc.) TVs take a forever to change channel, call quality seems to be worse than analog etc.
Self-driving cars are really cool but they won't really solve our transit problems, they'll probably just make them worse and more expensive. We should be focusing on better development patterns (appropriate density - not skyscrapers and not suburbia), walking, biking, and hopping on a tram or something along those lines.
Self-driving cars are an additive technology, and there is certainly a place for them, but they should be at best (like all cars) your 3rd or maybe even 4th best option for daily activities.
You are absolutely right, and the only negative is the utopian-esque description, therefore it'll never quite work as well as it should - but I think aiming for that will still get something better than what we've got.
Your comment just made me think about the whole self-driving car thing as an extension of the car-centric thinking of the US (and how car-centricity is essentially anti-social, but that's beside the point), and now even the US is losing the car race to China, but it will maintain it's car-centric philosophy based on momentum rather than practicality. Could public transport be a national security priority? (mostly tongue in cheek, but just a smidge not).
Yea, it is an extension. It's additive. The safest car is the one that's parked. Car-centric culture has a lot of negative externalities. But the entire society is geared toward cars and propping them up. Cars themselves, auto jobs, departments of highways, tires, oil, gas, insurance, fast food, COSTCO, you name it. Most of those things can be replaced with something as simple as a sidewalk and better urban planning. If your goal is to prop up an industry, self-driving cars will do that for you.
If your goal is to increase autonomy [1], wealth, entrepreneurship, and happiness and decrease death and health concerns, racism, obesity, and other things you need to move away from car-only building and design patterns. I also think busses are a problem because they just reinforce bad habits. For most municipalities a bus is just a worse version of your car which is why they're largely unsuccessful for the masses. Bike/walk/rail is, in my view, quite literally the only good path forward for future transportation development.
I don't think the US is losing the car race to China though. What race? Why are we even in a race all of a sudden? I drive an EV and like them but aside from emissions I'm not sure one is really all that better than another (I find EVs more convenient though).
[1] Been a bad person lately? Maybe the government and the vehicle facial recognition technology says sorry no driving for you. Now what? Secondarily for the elderly (as the single-issue voter OP has mentioned) walking/biking/rail allows for better outcomes and for folks to participate more in daily life. Driving becomes more and more hazardous as we age and folks wind up stuck at home.
Consider that it's probably not tech but rather a cycle of aesthetics you're experiencing.
Just like films, music, or even sports, there are eras of a certain paradigm or aesthetic. What we consider the 'peak' is always evaluated in retrospect or in comparison to a previous peak. Neurologically, humans are naturally predisposed to evaluate the world in terms of "how much pleasure" an activity gives, and when you experience "more pleasure" (for example, riding a fast rollercoaster vs. a slow one) then the previous experience is often discarded or treated as inferior. In some cases that's true, but, by and large, these comparisons are again purely psychic in nature.
What you viewed as more exciting was an age where advertising didn't cheapen your experiences. Overexposure/stimulation as a means of advertising, co-opted with combining social media with advertising to a startling degree is the true culprit behind what you're seeing, and as a captive audience, like the prisoners in Plato's cave, you are unable to look away...
Don't worry, you're just getting old. It happens to all of us. At some point we simply stop being excited about new shiny things and start to prefer stuff we know and rely on. In especially bad cases, some start seeing new shiny things as threat to the stability of their lives.
> If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
I’m 29 so I guess I just barely qualify haha. But overall, I agree with your writing and can say as a technologist myself, I also rarely get excited about new technology - nor do my peers.
There are occasional exceptions though. Near the beginning of this current GenAI revolution, I was frequently excited. Watching that SpaceX rocket land back on earth had me on the edge of my seat. I also recently bought AirPods and found the conversation awareness feature to be incredible. Similarly, I got my first fitness tracker and find it mind blowing how much it can measure by just zapping my wrist with light.
It isn’t that surprising that computers have become somewhat crap as they’ve gained ubiquitous adoption (that’s just the nature of appealing to everyone). IMO it is more surprising that nothing has really filled in that gap.
This is good because there are much better places to find fulfillment.
It's like when you get a new smartphone and you baby it for those first couple weeks until, bam, it falls and gets a ding in it. Then after a brief sense of loss, you suddenly see it as a tool with utility and a lifespan. I think that's where you want to be with material things and technology.
The last technology that truly excited me was the ebook. I truly believe is one of the greatest gadgets ever invented. It's just fantastic the disconnection you get with it, the quality of the screen, how long battery lasts and obviously how many books you can carry in a small package.
The marginal payoff from incremental innovation produces lesser and lesser endorphins as we age. They increasingly become a smaller part of our experiences.
And btw, by and large, this happens to every feeling, not just excitement from technological innovation.
One thing I've thought about for a long time, as someone who's been interested in new technology and sci-fi for a long time:
you still need to work; still need a job.
With all this new technology that does things for us, there will be new things that need doing in order that we can pay for the things that do the old things for us.
- 90s:
- video games were something truly new. before it, stories and fantasy was something to be enjoyed mostly through static medium. and games were the first medium that lets you interactively enjoy stories.
- internet was something truly new. never before we get to connect with people by sharing things we create. and there's so many things were created out of genuine love and passion
- late 2000s - social media were something truly new. it lets you connect with people and share things
every era brought something truly novel to the table. but then something changed mid 2010s. and it's not entirely megacorps' fault. it's also us customers. we didn't want to pay. and thus the business model that promotes enshittified services were born and now we have to live with it.
Echoing others here, but I think part of it is that a lot of the new tech is designed to make things worse.
If I think about new tech, all the examples that immediately spring to mind are negative ones: surveillance cameras, AI-enabled spam & propaganda, autonomous weaponry.
The less flashy advances tend to be harder to get excited about, and they're also often negative. My computers get more expensive, but they also collect more data on me, and it's harder to get one without a bunch of unwanted features.
People used to be excited about new tech because it was exciting and aspirational; I think we've lost a lot of that.
>But maybe I'm wrong? If you are in your 20s now and feel like writing down your thoughts about this topic, consider yourself challenged! I'd love to read them.
i'm 24. I think that improvements in tech nowadays mostly involve the hobbyist of any niche, while the general public is ever more satisfied with what already exists.
sd to hd to full hd was cool, full hd to 1440p i can see the difference, at 4k yes but it is not so big. Miniled is something people won't really care about imho (and they can already go very bright, i'm only waiting for more minileds to be integrated in monitors before changing mine).
Audio, well, most people will be satisfied with cheap razer/gaming/bose/whatever headphones are there. Sure anc is cool if you're in a noisy environment quite often
Bikes, well at 24yo i'm not really knowledgeable to say whether a bianchi that costs more than a motorbike is worth the upgrade from an older model... but ebikes are kinda nice even for people outside of the cycling world
However, what has happened with audio and video - and a change that i can perceive -, is the prices of things (not cpu/gpu related, for obvious reasons) coming down. oleds were so espensive ten years ago, now they are not. 4k minileds monitor are as expensive now as my regular non miniled 1440p va monitor from ~4/5 years ago. Hifiman has (permanently) slashed the prices of its headphones more than once over the years. It is not exciting as new tech but it is "just" nice
p.s. wifi printers are a pain in the ass much more than cable printes, and for llms i am kinda happy with them, i'll give you that, they're a godsend for studying
75 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] threadI know a lot of people have a troubled relationship to their phone, but this is really surprising to me. Would I want to go back to a world where I can't conveniently contact people, navigate the world, look up anything I want to know in an second, and set timers by yelling at the air rather than getting sticky foccacia dough in the cracks of my egg timer? Not even a little bit.
The last time I personally felt the excitement the author describes was probably with the announcement of Apple Vision Pro, but unfortunately that product went nowhere.
While not revolutionary - they're kind of an incremental improvement - I'm pretty impressed by all the things a cheap Chromebook can do.
Had I known I were going to be getting rid of my car, an e-bike would have definitely been a better value. I feel lucky that things worked out the way that they did though - having both an e-scooter and an acoustic bike has been great!
There are exceptions of course, But the general trend is worrying.
There's some sort of disease outbreak that turns people into zombies and society starts to collapse. Eventually things like the power grid and water/sewage infrastructure break down. Food rots. Gasoline runs out. It's basically guaranteed that you and your teammates will die in this game.
Even after living through a pandemic and all of the shit that came with it, and despite the grim atmosphere of the game, I still miss the time period that this game symbolized. I know I was only a child during the 90s and the era had its real problems, but there were good things about it and the state of technology at the time that have gotten worse in the decades since.
It was a time when media was a physical good and had meaning, when there wasn't a constant deluge of information, when my attention was less valuable than advertisers have made it today, and there was, at least for the majority of society, a shared informational reality.
That's all gone and there are massively powerful interests working to make sure it stays gone.
It may be the same stuff we had 20 years ago, but the specs!
What was a supercomputer before is now just a component in a datacenter, one of 72 per rack.
Then, about 7 years ago I realized that for the first time, I was more or less happy with the tech in my life. My computer was good, I liked my phone, my tablet, and my ereader. I had a good TV and stereo I used all the time. The appliances in my home are reliable and work well. The tools I use in my garage and yard are all fine. With Android Auto or Car Play (I've used both) even my car felt like it had crossed some threshold of being good enough that I didn't really have the itch for something better.
I had been working full time for 30ish years and had accumulated a lot of stuff that makes my life better and there really isn't much more that I want and certainly nothing that I need. When Christmas rolls around and people want gift ideas for me, it's hard for me to think of things. My favorite thing in the world is to have a few days off and no plans or commitments and I can sort drill bits, change my guitar strings, watch a movie, or take a nap.
I used to read sci fi for the wonder, but now I read it with dread, for Chekov's Gun is a Torment Nexus, and if you introduce a Torment Nexus in Act 1 of a sci fi dystopia, it will be fired IRL by act 3.
Deeper lurks a more chilling question: what, on a dying planet run by fascists, should I do with my time?
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Computers also was one of them. But modern media boxes are not exciting. Microcontrollers though, are still exciting.
Let's say you were born in 1910. The revolutionary stuff (at the time) was applying electricity to stuff. Well, by the time you were 30, you'd seen all that. "X thing that we'd done before, but now done by electricity" wasn't a revolutionary idea any more. And by 1940, the really revolutionary advances in airplanes had mostly already happened (although the switch to jet engines was still to come).
What did it take to be revolutionary to a 30-year-old in 1940? Penicillin. Color television. The computer. There were still revolutionary things happening, but the bar was raised.
Or take the 1980s. It was revolutionary. Everything that people were doing anyway, they figured out how to do on a PC. I remember that time. Every month, there were new things possible, things that I didn't even think of trying to do on a computer.
By about 1990, that was over. Oh, you got the computer to do one more thing? I'm not surprised any more. I've seen that a hundred times over the last decade. It's just one more thing now.
Same with the internet. At first it was magic. Now, you can do one more thing on the internet? Yawn. Of course you can.
What's revolutionary now? AI. Twenty years from now, it will be a yawn too. Oh, you got AI to do one more thing right? No big news.
TL;DR: I guess that after a bunch of changes that can all be lumped into one bucket in your thinking, more changes in that bucket don't seem as interesting as the first few did.
Transistors existed between 1950 and 1960. But they didn't really set the world on fire until the 1970s.
Computers existed in the 1950s, but they didn't explode into businesses until the IBM 360 series, and they didn't go into homes until the 1970s, and not in volume until the 1980s.
Xerox existed, but didn't explode until the 1970s.
And so on. It is decades from something being invented, to commercial availability, to widespread commercial use. And only when it becomes widespread does it change the world.
So I claim that the "revolutionary" part is when something already existing becomes widespread and applied. That was (in my previous examples) electricity in the 1920s and 30s, and personal computers in the 1980s and 90s. They already existed. But when they became widespread and used for everything, that's when the world changed.
So, what was that in the 2010s? I would say cell phones. Yeah, they existed before. But now everyone had them, which meant that everyone could be reached all the time, and everyone could take pictures, and read the news, and search the net, and watch sports, and listen to music, all the time, no matter where they were. That changed the world, or at least society, quite a bit.
What is it for the 2020s? It could be AI. That is, plausibly, exploding. If it continues to do so, it is likely to change everything. mRNA vaccines may become a thing that changes everything, at least as much as the polio vaccine, but we are not there yet - at this point it's still a maybe. SpaceX lowering the cost to orbit is a big deal. Starlink may be; I'm in the US, where internet rarely depends on satellites, so I'm not in a good position to judge that one.
I used to be very excited when new tech came out that empowered me to do new different things in more flexible ways that I can customize to be just perfect for me.
And you know what.. I'm still quite excited by new tech that does all of that! Latest for me is 3d printers (I know, I'm late to that game). Drawing and printing 3d objects is as exciting as when I discovered assembly language in elementary school in the 80s.
What's different? It used to be that most new tech fell into that category.
Today most new product releases are things that de-empower me, taking away flexibility, taking away my access, reducing configurability, further tighening the walled gardens, increasing dependencies on giant corporation clouds (which can block me in an instant), forcing in more and more spyware and advertising.
So yeah, no, I'm not excited about any of that garbage.
What new technologies are they excited about?
Self-driving cars are an additive technology, and there is certainly a place for them, but they should be at best (like all cars) your 3rd or maybe even 4th best option for daily activities.
Poor driving isn't limited to drunks or boomers.
Your comment just made me think about the whole self-driving car thing as an extension of the car-centric thinking of the US (and how car-centricity is essentially anti-social, but that's beside the point), and now even the US is losing the car race to China, but it will maintain it's car-centric philosophy based on momentum rather than practicality. Could public transport be a national security priority? (mostly tongue in cheek, but just a smidge not).
If your goal is to increase autonomy [1], wealth, entrepreneurship, and happiness and decrease death and health concerns, racism, obesity, and other things you need to move away from car-only building and design patterns. I also think busses are a problem because they just reinforce bad habits. For most municipalities a bus is just a worse version of your car which is why they're largely unsuccessful for the masses. Bike/walk/rail is, in my view, quite literally the only good path forward for future transportation development.
I don't think the US is losing the car race to China though. What race? Why are we even in a race all of a sudden? I drive an EV and like them but aside from emissions I'm not sure one is really all that better than another (I find EVs more convenient though).
[1] Been a bad person lately? Maybe the government and the vehicle facial recognition technology says sorry no driving for you. Now what? Secondarily for the elderly (as the single-issue voter OP has mentioned) walking/biking/rail allows for better outcomes and for folks to participate more in daily life. Driving becomes more and more hazardous as we age and folks wind up stuck at home.
Think about all the fun wifi, zigbee, matter devices that you can play with (if you are inclined).
Meshtastic and LoRa is a great toy to play with.
The kitchen is full of interesting things, Sous Vide is great, the air fryer is... interesting and useful.
Lots of people love their robot vacuum
LED strip lighting has gone from nerdy to high design and has interesting features now.
Those "VCR" and "iPhone" moments are rare. There is a lot of practical innovations that make my life better and I would be hard pressed to give up.
Just like films, music, or even sports, there are eras of a certain paradigm or aesthetic. What we consider the 'peak' is always evaluated in retrospect or in comparison to a previous peak. Neurologically, humans are naturally predisposed to evaluate the world in terms of "how much pleasure" an activity gives, and when you experience "more pleasure" (for example, riding a fast rollercoaster vs. a slow one) then the previous experience is often discarded or treated as inferior. In some cases that's true, but, by and large, these comparisons are again purely psychic in nature.
What you viewed as more exciting was an age where advertising didn't cheapen your experiences. Overexposure/stimulation as a means of advertising, co-opted with combining social media with advertising to a startling degree is the true culprit behind what you're seeing, and as a captive audience, like the prisoners in Plato's cave, you are unable to look away...
I’m 29 so I guess I just barely qualify haha. But overall, I agree with your writing and can say as a technologist myself, I also rarely get excited about new technology - nor do my peers.
There are occasional exceptions though. Near the beginning of this current GenAI revolution, I was frequently excited. Watching that SpaceX rocket land back on earth had me on the edge of my seat. I also recently bought AirPods and found the conversation awareness feature to be incredible. Similarly, I got my first fitness tracker and find it mind blowing how much it can measure by just zapping my wrist with light.
It's like when you get a new smartphone and you baby it for those first couple weeks until, bam, it falls and gets a ding in it. Then after a brief sense of loss, you suddenly see it as a tool with utility and a lifespan. I think that's where you want to be with material things and technology.
After a while, It turned out that none of these mattered. And I am back to paper books..
And btw, by and large, this happens to every feeling, not just excitement from technological innovation.
you still need to work; still need a job.
With all this new technology that does things for us, there will be new things that need doing in order that we can pay for the things that do the old things for us.
I still find this a jarring thought.
every era brought something truly novel to the table. but then something changed mid 2010s. and it's not entirely megacorps' fault. it's also us customers. we didn't want to pay. and thus the business model that promotes enshittified services were born and now we have to live with it.
If I think about new tech, all the examples that immediately spring to mind are negative ones: surveillance cameras, AI-enabled spam & propaganda, autonomous weaponry.
The less flashy advances tend to be harder to get excited about, and they're also often negative. My computers get more expensive, but they also collect more data on me, and it's harder to get one without a bunch of unwanted features.
People used to be excited about new tech because it was exciting and aspirational; I think we've lost a lot of that.
i'm 24. I think that improvements in tech nowadays mostly involve the hobbyist of any niche, while the general public is ever more satisfied with what already exists.
sd to hd to full hd was cool, full hd to 1440p i can see the difference, at 4k yes but it is not so big. Miniled is something people won't really care about imho (and they can already go very bright, i'm only waiting for more minileds to be integrated in monitors before changing mine).
Audio, well, most people will be satisfied with cheap razer/gaming/bose/whatever headphones are there. Sure anc is cool if you're in a noisy environment quite often
Bikes, well at 24yo i'm not really knowledgeable to say whether a bianchi that costs more than a motorbike is worth the upgrade from an older model... but ebikes are kinda nice even for people outside of the cycling world
However, what has happened with audio and video - and a change that i can perceive -, is the prices of things (not cpu/gpu related, for obvious reasons) coming down. oleds were so espensive ten years ago, now they are not. 4k minileds monitor are as expensive now as my regular non miniled 1440p va monitor from ~4/5 years ago. Hifiman has (permanently) slashed the prices of its headphones more than once over the years. It is not exciting as new tech but it is "just" nice
p.s. wifi printers are a pain in the ass much more than cable printes, and for llms i am kinda happy with them, i'll give you that, they're a godsend for studying