My future tech utopia

My future tech utopia
Photo by Phillip Glickman / Unsplash

This is how I would like to interact with technology. It’s a mix of oldskool with a sprinkle of tech that does not yet exist. It's a utopia, so it's not realistic. Don't come at me in the comments with "trololo this isn't going to work." LET ME DREAM FOR JUST ONE HOT MINUTE, YEAH?!

To start off my "this is just my opinion, man" piece: I don’t think people are meant to be online all the time.

Our puny brain cannot handle the barrage of info we feed it these days. The news, memes, TikToks, tweets/toots (how do y'all call this on Bluesky?), messages in DM's and groups. It’s an endless stream, we just don't notice anymore that our brain is drowning. We scroll some more while complaining how tired and overwhelmed we feel all the time.

If you consume most of your content via algorithm driven platforms, you are being manipulated. Big Tech has hacked our psyche and knows how to gobble up our precious attention.

Time is actually the most valuable thing you have, not money. Only idiots think it’s money.

The more time you piss away on things you don’t actually value, the more you are losing.

That’s why, in my future tech utopia, interaction with technology is partly like it was in the 90ies. Remember when you had a PC at home (sorry, Gen-Z, this is probably not familiar to you), and you had to purposefully interact with it? Turn it on, wait, do on it whatever it is you wanted to do and then turn it off again. Remember the cute rattling sounds your harddrive made?

When you were not near your PC, you were offline. Glorious. If you were waiting for the bus, you could strike up a conversation with someone else at the bus stop, or you grabbed your book and started reading. Or you just stood there, just existing. There were few other options. I think this was good.

What we need is that, in the public space, people are more focused on other people. That lost sense of community many people feel is largely self-inflicted. The world you see through your phone is not the real world, just something you passively observe, chosen by the algorithm because it's likely to trigger you.

But as long as that phone is always in everybody’s pockets, things will not change. The allure of the damn thing is too great. Almost everybody is addicted to their smartphone, myself included. Getting that sweet dopamine hit from a like on your LinkedIn post is easy, just grab your phone, open the app. And that’s exactly why my vision for future tech is utopian.

Given that most people are not willing to let go of their smartphone for now (and a lot of you are probably on your computer all day for work 😅), what can you even do now? What is less utopian, and more realistic?

Join local initiatives, chat with people every chance you get, join an orchestra, learn pole dancing, pick analog hobbies like knitting or handwriting, read books, play board games. Anything to spend less time on your phone. Give Big Tech less hold over you. Make your usage conscious. That’s what I’m doing right now, with positive results so far on my wellbeing.

Back to utopia for the second part of my vision.

This kind of tech does not yet exist, that I know of. If technology is delegated back to a physical corner in my house and no longer with me all the time, that would be great. But, every time I use the computer, the screen is still the main interface. That’s a problem for me. As soon as I open a browser tab, I open a social media website. It’s extremely compulsive behavior, yes. I have not managed to train myself to do otherwise. Maybe the solution is elsewhere.

I would like to have a different type of interface option with the computer. I want to talk with it, and I want it to know everything about my life (lol, a privacy nightmare). That goes way beyond what current “AI” is capable of. Currently, “AI” is not at all intelligent, it’s an LLM, which is a crucial difference! I want to ask my computer, “can you give me the most important messages I received at work” and then it gives me a factual summary of e-mails and chats that are important for me. A bit like how Jarvis, the personal assistant of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies, worked.

I want tech to truly assist me in my life, not to gobble up so much of my attention. Now that I'm already purposefully barely using social media apps, I'm consuming a lot less video. It's nice. Video is too addictive, it pushes the right pleasure buttons in my brain too much, and that makes it hard to put the phone down. Written and spoken words don't have that "feature". I can consume them without that addictive feeling.

As far as I know, this personal assistant technology does not exist yet. Don't come at me with "use Siri" or "use Alexa", no, that's the big tech I want to get away from. (Siri is awful, btw). You can't really converse with a computer and make it do your bidding in a clear way. The computer doesn't know the full context of my life (which is still a huge privacy and security problem in my utopian vision).

So my "truly useful™" personal assistant has to be developed by people who care about privacy, security, and not about money. It's never going to happen, lol.

That is my tech utopia dream. Back in real life, I have already changed my relationship with algorithm-driven platforms. Less algorithm, more conscious internet consumption. May I suggest you do the same?

What is your tech utopia? Tell me about it!