The AI Craze & Modernism

Intro

I don't know much about business, but I do know that corporations are increasingly focusing on both maximizing profit and optimizing AI usage, whether that means recycling the same laptop chassis for numerous models or placing a "AI Ready" badge on your rice cooker.

The gold-tinted sunglasses won't stay on. As every good organization does, the concept of doing something well takes a back seat in favor of doing something inexpensively, even if it means losing reliability. Consider all of those low-cost laptops with eMMC storage: if the flash memory dies, the laptop is completely useless, even if the rest of the system is intact. UFS is no exception, with more dependability, but even it will fail the test of time. Both will fail before a typical NVMe SSD can reach 99% health.

Is AI really all that useful as its marketed as?

AI being forced down our throats doesn't help either, especially when the features are pushed out to machines without the fancy new NPU or AI acceleration. My small Huawei laptop has no AI acceleration hardware, but Windows 11 opted to start running Copilot, reducing my battery life by half owing to a lack of sufficient dedicated hardware. And that's not even going into how incomplete Windows 11 is, which, despite the marketing, is essentially a rounded-corner Windows 10 release with parts of Windows 7 still in use under the hood. I understand; don't ruin what works.

Profit First! Mentality

This doesn't even touch the surface of unfinished items. Half of the AAA games, and even the operating systems we use, are incomplete from the start, with bug fixes arriving months later than they should. And the needlessly high demand for ridiculous standards results in functioning items being sold, discarded, or replaced. The consumerism market has also altered, favoring device replacement and upgrading above part replacement and environmental conservation.

It's all about making things for as much profit as possible, both in good and bad ways. HP reused the same chassis for their higher end laptops, so swapping in parts from those is actually nice. But Apple with their soldered memory and storage isn't; especially given the outrageous prices they sell devices at, and the fact their competitors do so too namely because people actually cough up the two grand it costs. I've seen people with $3,000 MacBook Pros use only Facebook and Instagram, where the people with $100 "amazon specials" actually develop and push out finished programs on their own.

Are we going downhill?

Did I say I despise contemporary technology? Okay, let me tell it again. I hate modern technology.

Back in the day, you could buy a laptop with upgradeable storage, RAM, and even the CPU and GPU. You could put an operating system on it without worrying about whether it will be supported in a year or two. Games could run fine; as long as you had some reasonable hardware, they performed well.

However, nowadays, you have to worry about whether you can even enlarge your memory. Whether Windows 11 will suddenly leave you in the dust since your computer no longer matches the already stringent standards. Games require a lot of storage and memory to even launch, and everyone is in favor of "don't fix it, replace it."