The Samsung Note 7 may be significant.
Sticking the batteries into them made sure the company could not update them when the batteries failed.
Being too smart by half overloaded the machine's capacity.
The result is a complete failure.
Of course we can say these are design faults. But suppose they are something else? Suppose they are a symptom of the fact that we may have reached the limited to complexity?
Suppose we are at the point where the evolution of technology may need to stop for three reasons. First, we don't use most of the technology we have anyway. Second, the technology can't sustainably work anymore. And third, as a result we're not going to risk using it.
I stress the 'suppose': I gather the iPhone 7 is selling so some people still want tech, but I will guarantee that most users (like me, as owner of a relatively cheap smart phone) use only a fraction of what their phone is supposedly capable of doing.
What happens when we all realise we can happily downgrade, as I did a while ago, without any loss to convenience, at all?
Of course you could say that's just a syndrome of a mature market (when getting off a tube yesterday I noticed all 12 people who did so we're carrying a phone in their hand at the time). But what if it's not just a mature market but technology itself that has matured, and we have realised that? That we will say no to driverless cars? And no to all that automation that will render so many of us redundant? That the human will strike back because although we might get grumpy and we might make mistakes we're still a lot more comprehensible and a bit less combustible than technology?
I think that possible.
What then?
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How do you suppress monkey curiosity? Humans are going to explore things that interest them whatever you do to attempt to supress their innate humanity.
The next wave of technology will make our lives simpler rather than more complex. Your AI assistant will sort all your problems for you.
Technology does not need to make us all redundant if the good political choices are made. We have a crisis in social care which means there is a demand for services that is not being met. If waiting lists for operations are too long we need more doctors and more nurses. Governments can spend more, employ more people and achieve a positive economic return.
Technology kills jobs is a neoliberal conspiracy to maintain fear and acceptance of low wages. As long as humans are insatiable there is demand and the economy can grow.
Most smartphones (sic) have the batteries firmly secured by adhesive, it’s fairly essential to prevent movement. Apple uses double-sided adhesive tape: Samsung used several blodges of adhesive “mastic” on the Note 7. It’s a bit packed inside the 7…and the pick-up for the wireless charging is on top of the lithium battery…It will be interesting to know what the failure mode is, Samsung don’t yet! Mind you, Lithium cells have bad press when it comes to overcharging, and their short-circuit mode is dramatic failure. Rather worrying, considering that the phone batteries are around 13W/Hrs while car cells are hovering upwards of 70KW/Hrs…and who can forget the 787 Dreamliners being grounded due to faults with the lithium cells in the APU?
As batteries get more power-intensive, events such as the above are going to continue.
Wouldn’t have happened with NMh or NCa batteries, but they do not have the size/power needed….
Interesting questioning the need for technology….I noted a few months ago that certain stock exchanges/banks/investors have installed point-to-point laser comms links because the signal transit times of cable/copper induce significant “lag” in datacomms used in trading….apparently, a few nanoseconds delays make a the difference between profit and loss…
I’ll stick with my iphone/ipad combo….the interconnection between them, especially with the poor GSM signal where I live (not as bad as most of Norfolk) makes leaving the phone upstairs a necessity…and the ipad handles incoming text/calls downstairs (bad signal due to parish council refusing permission for a microcell on the village outskirts because of the cancer risk to the lampost)
I like the last
Sounds NFN: Normal for Norfolk
Richard, partly agree with you on this. I agree with the fact that the vast majority of people don’t use the vast majority of the capability in the technology they buy. Laptops are a classic example of this. The vast majority of people will only ever use a laptop for the internet and the standard office type programmes. These applications really don’t need much computing power at all. Hence the move in the market to cheaper, smaller laptops and tablets. Personally it is rare that I turn on my laptop at home now as everything I want to do can be done with much more convenience on my smart phone or tablet.
Though you should not forget Moore’s law which states broadly that processing power doubles every two years whilst becoming cheaper to produce. This basic fact will I think continue to drive the technological advancement and the amount of spare technological capacity we are carrying round in our pockets or have sitting at home.
Where I don’t agree with you is the idea of the market not wanting more technology and there being no market for things such as a driverless cars. Why would we buy washing machines and dishwashers but not driverless cars? Both fulfil the same task of freeing our time to be spent on things we would prefer to be doing. Why would you opt to sit stressed in a traffic jam as a driver when everyone around you is sat in their driverless car reading or watching TV? My own prediction, for what it is worth, is that there will come a time when it is illegal to drive a car on the roads. When the majority of cars are computer controlled and talking to each other the danger comes from having an unpredictable human driven car in the mix. Driven cars might become toys that those with an interest go to a race track to play with.
There has been a prediction that Moore’s Law is coming to an end. But I agree with you that technology has a way to go yet and there will be further developments in AI. I look to science (as opposed to fantasy) directed science fiction. When you have good scientists with creative talents assisting in film and tv you often get good predictions and driverless cars is a good one – Minority Report and others much earlier. There are limits though. In the film of the latter, lovely Audis sliding along busy highways, but I’d like to see it picking it’s way through the back streets of Slough on a Friday afternoon.
And that still does not answer the question as to why we travel
And whether there are better things to do
Which I was alluding to
No chance. AI will transform our lives for the better. It’s an inevitable trend.
I admire your confidence
I think it simplistic, to be polite
Human – a frightened, curious, horny ape, who likes to walk in the sunshine, be valued and pass away surrounded by loving family / obedient vassals (serious psycho-social defects optional).
Human2.0 – a biotech hybrid with embedded RF comms, comes in a variety of forms from Commander Mars Base to lobotomised hostess trolley.
3.0 – self-engineering sentient bio-forms which can populate any niche in the galaxy over a multi-MY cycle, like bacteria in the early oceans.
We are driven to evolve. Our project must be to persuade the driverless car that the driver is in some way valuable.
Bravo!
a wonderfully lucid observation about the folly of technological ‘advances’
it sounds like you are ready to dip into the world view of John Michael Greer who has been dissecting this phenomena for some time,
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/
oops.. must dash, my Nokia 6120 Classic is ringing!
Design/Build to maintain – not replace. The battery in my partners Nokia Lumia 800 is on the way out: ordered a new one (cheap as chips) & a video on youtube shows me how to dissasemble the phone & replace the battery. What is not to like? Indeed, I’ll probably buy one myself. The Samsung fiasco shows that other mfus – now build not to maintain but to throw away, coupled to a congenital inability to pay taxes.
Designing and building something with a view to maintenance offers … jobs. Sadly most manufacturing companies still think in terms of design/build/sell – wait for consumer to throw away and then re-sell. This does not hold out any prosepct for the survival of what passes for our “civilisation” in the medium, let alone the long term.
Throw away is undoubtedly the plan…
It is crazy
You could say the same thing about dishwashers which have also been in the news recently for catching fire. Yet I don’t think that one or two bad products will mean the end of technological progress.
As for automation “rendering us redundant” well that’s an interesting choice of words – implying melt down and unemployment. This is one course that technological and social change could take us on.
20 years ago (when I was a teenager) I would have preferred that humanity take a more cautious path – but having burned all the oil and coal I now think we have already made our choice and a technological future is the only one that offers hope.
What we choose to do with that technology remains to be seen
Will it mean a life of leisure and creativity – or a life of unemployed misery?
I truly hope for the first – but it will take some changing of ideas about what life is for and how wealth should be distributed – which is why I read your blog 🙂
Just imagine if instead of being “redundant” people would have time to dream, make, and ply – time to raise their kids, look after the sick and the frail.
What if “What do you do?” wasn’t a question about your job title?
It would be good, wouldn’t it
And free so many from angst
I wish I shared your optimism. Pandora opened the jar. After the evils had escaped all that was left was was ‘Hope’. And that’s probably our best bet right now. Unless there is a global spiritual revolution leading to a transformation of human consciousness. Never say never. As Osho said: “Be realistic – plan for a miracle”!
In economic terms, it would simply reaffirm Marx’s prediction for the long-term decline in profitability, which is already a fact with the movement of capital into assets and not production.
The social consequences are unpredictable other than increased instability, further exposing us to the threat of Fascism.
There’s trouble at mill!
Don’t worry Richard. You are old and out of date and the modern world must seem confusing and frightening. It will happen to everyone I am sure.
My 15 year old is more certain of this than I am
You might like this as an alternative. “We aim to create positive social and environmental impact from the beginning to the end of a phone’s life cycle”
https://www.fairphone.com/en/our-goals/
I got my Fairphone 2 a few months back from the Phone Coop.
It’s not available right now
You would struggle to be more wrong if you tried.
Every useful technological advance that changes someone’s life for the better (and beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder on this one) has succeeded. We’ve become so used to technological advances being near-perfect at release that stories like that of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 come as a surprise. There was the iPhone 6 Plus being genuinely bendy as well, though, and an Australian cyclist receiving third-degree burns after his iPhone 7 set on fire in his cycling shorts pocket – Apple aren’t blameless here.
That doesn’t mean people are going to stop buying phones. That doesn’t mean kids, teenagers and young adults are suddenly going to go “one particular model of phone set on fire, that’s enough technology for me!” No – the brand’s reputation will suffer and they’ll get a Google Pixel phone instead. Sure, luddites like yourself might decide that they’re happy with the way life was when they were in their 20s and 30s and just pick and choose little bits of the new world to join in with, but it’s not old people who drive technological innovation. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
You grew up in Ipswich at a time when brownouts were common. Your 20s and 30s were spent in the pre-Internet era. The fact that you’re unwilling to embrace new technology and think that we should all go back to how it used to be “when I were a lad” is no different to almost anyone else over the age of 40. It’s to be expected that you’ll think that way, and it’s also inevitable that you’ll be proven wrong every day for the rest of your life.
I bought a PC in 1983
I embrace technology in a way most of my generation never have
Your suggestion that I am a technophobe is utterly absurd
But I am still right to ask questions about it
Sorry, you could not be more wrong if you tried
You embrace technology in a way most of your generation never have? And yet you think technology is going to stop because you don’t understand how a modern phone works.
No, you used to embrace technology in a way most of your generation never did, but you’ve now stopped because you don’t get it any more and the world will just merrily leave you behind. In about ten years’ time, when I’m sat in my driverless car doing some useful work, you’ll be performing the economically pointless task of piloting a vehicle which a computer could do cheaper, better and more efficiently and getting stressed out over sitting in that never-ending traffic jam.
I use my phone in more advanced ways than, as far as I can tell, most teenagers do (have two teenage sons)
And still use a small proprtion of what it can probably do
I had good reasons for saying what I did
And all you can do is make stuff up. This is wasting my time
Why not engage with the issue?
You`re in your car driving around a twisty cliff road. You come around a blind corner and there is a school bus broken down in front of you. There are some 6 year olds in the road.
You hit them. Its a terrible tragedy but no one blames you as there was no time to do anything else.
You`re in your self driving car driving around a twisty cliff road. You come around a blind corner and there is a school bus broken down in front of you. There are some 6 year olds in the road.
The self driving car has almost instantaneous reactions: it can make two choices – drive the car over the cliff, killing you or drive into the kids.
How will it decide this trolley problem:in a Benthamite fashion (saving the greater number of lives) or putting its principal first – ie saving you and sacrificing the kids?
This is the programmers decision. Will the programmer then face the lawsuits from your family/kids families?
Would you go into a self driving car knowing that, in the right circumstances, it would sacrifice you?
Would you be happy with being in a car that would decide these things at random? (Imagine the court cases going on for years regarding what constitutes `random`)
Precisely
A self-driving car won’t be as stupid as a human when going around a blind corner. If it can’t see around the corner, it will slow down to a speed where it can stop where it can see. Humans will pelt around a blind corner at 60mph just assuming that everything is fine round there because it was fine there yesterday. Furthermore, communication between driverless cars will let your car know way before you get there that there’s a hazard there.
Driverless cars won’t become popular until problems like this are solved, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be driving around in two ton metal boxes that kill 3,000 people a year in our country alone forever. 100% of accidents on our roads are caused by humans in some way, because the human brain is absolutely awful at monitoring things, and piloting any sort of vehicle is just monitoring things for the most part.
Of course, in your example, the human would be prosecuted for causing death by dangerous driving for being a cretin and going too fast around a blind corner and then mowing down some defenceless schoolchildren, but that’s part of the reason we need driverless cars – once they’re ready.
People won’t use cars that are so risk averse they impede progress
We take risk for reasons
If you programme it out people will drive
Rob seems to ignore the fact that driving cars can be fun. If it is a winding cliff top road why would you let a computer do it for you? Especially if it is a high performance vehicle. And I am a bit confused about 6 year olds wandering about behind a broken down bus. Who is in charge for goodness sake? Get them out of the road! Put a warning triangle up!
People take risks when driving, generally, because they’re not very good at driving. Impeding progress by perhaps a minute per hour is fine, especially when the occupant is watching TV. But driverless cars, when they reach a certain critical mass, won’t be affected by the concertina effect that causes tens of minutes of delay per hour on motorways. So-called “smart” motorways will be redundant, because the cars will communicate that data to each other and react to it faster than the motorway can monitor it and modify the speed limit. Furthermore, they won’t be travelling at 40mph or 50mph but 46.63mph, or similar.
If it’s done correctly the benefits greatly outweigh the disadvantages. And there are so many billions of dollars being spent on this technology by so many companies all over the world that they will get it right.
The other point is that it’ll no longer be necessary or even financially beneficial to own a car. Car ownership is expensive, but much cheaper than getting public transport everywhere. When you can use an app to request a driverless bus stops near your house when you have to go to work in the morning or, for those in more remote areas or with more expendable income, a driverless car to come and pick you up, every vehicle on the road will spend more of its time in use or on charge and the total number of vehicles will fall dramatically. Transport costs will fall from pounds per mile to pence per mile. It will be the great enabling technology that allows us to travel further, faster and more efficiently than ever before – and it won’t matter whether you’re young or old, sober or drunk, or whatever – if you can pay for it, it’ll be point-to-point, and it won’t be expensive.
And when I decide to go out now….I mean now…..?
Rob Bryant: I know driving cars can be fun. But 99% of the time for 99% of people it’s a miserable, expensive experience.
So let’s go back to the question on why we travel
And how can we do better?
The whole point about accidents is that they are unforseeable – sometimes even by Google, believe it or not. Humans have this tendency to do unpredictable things (especially small humans)and ignore rules. Its amazing that not everybody carries a warning triangle along with their First Aid kit, tow rope and snow chains but there you go.
We need to re-humanise many tasks because we have not really worked out how people will live without work or lowly paid work because of technology. I’m also struck by how busy technology makes us – always available to be asked to do sonmething or do more via our mobile phomes. I can see us all getting tired and just wanting more peace and quiet eventually. The best part of my day is whan I turn the bloody thing off.
When they announced a car that drives itself I thought that the market had a made a big mistake. Many of us enjoy driving. Many of us make a living out of it. But a car driven by itself is different to say the Dockland Light Railway which seem to be driven and controlled remotely by other people. The prospect of self driving cars fills me with horror.
What we really need is a car that cleans itself in my view. But then that would be the loss to the economy too in terms of cleaning products, spray washes and car washes. Bit a lot less than say driverless cars. But which one will we get.
But then who is going to be earning enough in the future to afford one?
My other issue with technology is I feel that we are getting it to do too much for us. Rather than being an aid, it becomes the means. So what will happen with our own in-built data procesing capacity? I worry that it is making us too passive or too much of a distraction away from other more fundamental issues we should be concerned about.
Agreed
Why do we need to re-humanise tasks? Every time a technological advance is made, it frees people up to do other things, to make money in other ways. It’s a good job you’re not in charge or we’d all still be farmers who die before 30 because we’re all too busy making food to be able to worry about technology and its subsequent healthcare benefits.
This technology will cure cancer one day; we won’t get there without it.
So we’ll all die of heart failure with dementia
When I was younger Rob I was told that my generation would have more leisure time because of technology.
However, all I see these days is:
1) too many folk without meaningful work who are described as being lazy
(their leisure time is decried by society/the media);
2) we are not prepared to pay them for this leisure time in a way so that the
leisure time is worth having;
3) too little or no work for some and too much for others and technology
heaving on the workload;
4) those less productive getting most of the wealth output for the little
work they actually do;
5) too much time making money out of money that has been made instead of
making things;
6) the value of work is being eroded by lower wages even though it is
becoming more scarce;
7) part-time work (which should offer more leisure time) is so poorly paid
that the leisure time is used to get……..another part-time job(s).
Also, hard work never killed anyone.
Yes those in slavery throughout history have been worked to death but that is far from normal.
Farmers die because of suicides because markets all too often expect them to sell the results of the labours for peanuts or expect unreasonable quality standards or because of poor agricultural policy from Government (sometimes a mixture of all of these) makes making ends meet in farming incredibly hard. But farmers die but not because they work themselves to death. So don’t be silly – you must have heard of technology like ‘tractors’ and ‘combined harvestors’ surely?
Watch the documentary ‘The Lie of the Land’ and you will see farmers who love their job but find it sometimes impossible to do for a variety of reasons mainly to do with the creating of artificual price competition on behalf of the super-market industry to gain market share.
I assure you that appreciate technology and its role in my life but it is a facilitator of humanity – not a replacement thank you very much.
And as for cancer – it will be human curiosity and originality that will cure it – not some computer or app.
I’d rather die of heart failure with dementia at 105 than bowel cancer at 42 or bubonic plague at 27…
Few people much enjoy life at 105
They’re usually desperately lonely
The self-driving car will have other advantages/advances….it will be in communication with the bus and will have been notified it is there…and will doubtless have firmware that tells it “max speed near a bus 15mph”….after all, it is illegal in the states to overtake a school bus while the buses red lights are flashing or it moves away…a simple situation, software-wise, to red-light on the comms link.
I am now in my early sixties and I remember being told when I was at school that one of the biggest issues I would face in my adult years would be how to use my leisure time. Apparently technology was going to free me as a human being. I’m still waiting!
Admittedly, technology has meant that laundry can be washed in a machine and carpets don’t have to be swept with a brush. Technology has produced all sorts of benefits in medicine. I really am NOT a technology neanderthal. However, on reflection, not all technology has benefits and, in some cases, has created work. For example, I was a teacher and spreadsheets meant that all sorts of data could be collected and ‘crunched’. I can’t honestly say that education (the result of the relationship between teacher and pupil) improved and almost certainly diverted funding away from that relationship. I wouldn’t have been too unhappy if a fire had taken hold in the DfE’s server 😉
You’re right
Data is not knowledge
And information is not wisdom
Of course, that’s true. But it can be spectacularly helpful when analysed well. Like the Artemis Project, for example (see http://www.cnbc.com/2013/09/13/big-datas-powerful-effect-on-tiny-babies.html ) which gives doctors 24 hours’ more notice of an infection in very young babies than they ever had before, allowing tests to be done and medication to be administered long before any “traditional” symptoms show up.
If someone of similar skill analysed data in a school, I’m sure they’d come up with more useful results than the “let’s throw everything in a spreadsheet, save it on a floppy disk and hide it in a locked cupboard” brigade who really DO just make people work on stuff with no value.
But given people can’t conceive of the right questions to ask and substitute data instead how are you going to overcome technology imposing the burden?
It’s interesting that most of the responses have been Luddite-orientated – i.e only retards don’t welcome any technological development, irrespective of what it is. But that’s not the spirit of what I read into your original post.
Nobody would deny the incredible advances that have been made both in terms of liberating humans from drudgery and improving public health, etc. However, I believe you make a very valid point. Maybe too much technology – of the wrong kind – is potentially detrimental to the long-term quality of our lives.
For me there are worrying political aspects regarding control. Governments welcome anything that gives them soft power over the population and much of today’s technology does just that – viz. RFID chips, which are already used ‘benignly’ by corporations in Sweden – http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/swedish-tech-company-begins-human-microchip-implantation-employees.
How soon before all newborns are chipped? It’s not a conspiracy theory – http://www.americasfreedomfighters.com/2014/04/04/nbc-predicts-all-americans-will-receive-a-microchip-implant-in-2017-per-obamacare.
Clearly there are amazing opportunities for future technology to liberate society and improve the quality of life both at home and at work. But, not all technology is benign – nor are the companies that produce it. My own pessimistic prediction is that illiberal governments will take control to an unprecedented level. Well, they already know where you are thanks to the GPS signal from your android.
Caveat emptor!
I have no problem at all with the right use of technology
I live sitting in a cafe (as now) connecting to the world. It’s mind blowing
I would have lived the technology we now have as a teenager: I would have been a blogger rather than a blogger I suspect (and only time to learn is preventing that now) but a Luddite I am not
The question is ‘what is the gain?’
And that is more important than ‘can we do it?’ to me
How can anyone on this blog be a luddite given the means by which they have contributed? Come on…………..
And perhaps this is one of the more negative aspects of such technology – its efficiency at recording what we think actually prevents from thinking a bit more before we write?
And yes – I have been guilty of that too unfortunately.
… and I haven’t even mentioned drones that can either deliver your Amazon order to you front-door (convenient for many) or else decimate villages from the distant comfort of an executive military office.
Richard is right about loneliness. Some research even suggest there’s a link between ill health and loneliness in itself. I’m a T2 diabetic and have been for years (despite not having the usual lifestyle sins) and it can wear patients down. We now have the technology to monitor people at home and, presumably, prescribe appropriately. The trouble is that anybody with a chronic, progressive illness knows how valuable a visit to a sympathetic GP can be. I don’t know how many times I’ve unleashed my frustration or burst into tears in the GP’s surgery. Diabetes UK even recognises ‘diabetes burn out’ when patients just get fed up with the restrictions on their lifestyle and become careless about medication and diet, which leads to poorer outcomes. Technology has certainly contributed to better health and longer lives, but I dread to think of a time when there is no longer a human touch. In fact, Hunt already seems to think we can do without GPs with his garbage about diagnosing meningitis via the internet.
Completely agreed
That “diabetes burn-out” is common to all chronic illness..
People either reach a point where they get careless or where they apathy sinks in.
Due (largely) to the cost of hospitalisation, my treatment has evolved to the point where my IV meds are now done at home, by me (it’s lots cheaper to train me and provide the gear than it is to admit me for 14 days!)
It seems that may be coming to an end soon, due to cost!
Doubtless the balance sheet shows that the cost of home treatment is high, but the opposing column, showing that hospital treatment is much higher, has not been input!!
It would be nice to think that Hunt is a fool. Unfortunately, as the co-author of a few “books” pushing for the adoption of private health insurance, it is highly likely he is downgrading the health service prior to sale. Since virgin care now “runs” many hundreds of General practices, and their biz model always ends with “sold”………….
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1-5w6_ur48SRAkUrtgRJX0d4egHa2-sNJ4P3uNgOp9lQ
Fortunately, google caches things that have disappeared…so the above is A Burnhams letter to J Hunt..
I think this story backs up your case Richard https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/12/english-man-spends-11-hours-trying-to-make-cup-of-tea-with-wi-fi-kettle
I too admire and use technology.
But we must reconcile what its impact is on what humans do with their time.
We just haven’t done that yet. Nor do we seem to want to. Technological growth is exceeding the ability of our social attitudes to keep up. And for those who are caught out by changes to the world of work (made redundant) that is the worst kind of future shock that requires being more new ways of looking at occupation.
God my typing here has been bloody awful recently.
It’s all the damn computer’s fault obviously!!
Apologies anyway.
You have a long way to go to get to my level
We often hear about issues relating to productivity in the workplace, but exactly the same inefficiency exists many times over inside smart phones and computers. The software is notoriously inefficient because resources are seen as cheap and programmers can consequently ignore how poor the software they have written actually is.
If there is a limit to battery technology (and I don’t think we are there quite yet) then the time may finally arrive when people improve the software instead, something which will eliminate the need for better hardware.
What we are seeing, in batteries, is that they have stability problems when a large amount of energy is extracted in a short amount of time!
And battery life can be extended quite well by turning of what you don’t need on.
WiFi/Bluetooth are off on my phone when I’m out. Location services are always off!
Brightness can be either on auto, or manually turned down….
Many phones have pull-up, or pull-down, menus that enable easy changes to the system settings…
Have you seen the ad for a well-known building society? If not, search for Sugar J Poet Face to Face on YouTube. It’s directly relevant to mobile phones and communication.
I’ve had an issue with that building society in the past 🙁 but I love the ad.
“I like my connectivity but it shouldn’t block my interconnectivity.”
It’s interesting that banks and utility companies etc have brought back some of their call centres to the UK, despite having the technology to outsource to the ends of the earth, where labour is cheap.
I agree with many of your points – I have a phone whose capacity I make very little use of. I do use and value my old laptop (on which I am writing this comment), because as a photographer I value seeing images at full screen size – however old here actually means six years old.
We need to use technology to argument and not replace us. Driver less cars are an example of this as we are good at driving cars. This is why it is taking so long the make self driving cars safe. We are very bad at monitoring and taking quick action in the case of an error. I believe it will always unsafe for a car driver to monitor a driver less car. Technology to monitor and provide advice and emergency action like braking would be much more efficient.
For me to consider using a driver less car would require a guarantee from the manufacture and insurance against an accident so I could use the time to work or relax. Personally I would like to read which is why I prefer to travel by train.