How Did We Get Here?
To be quite frank, greed. Corporate greed and all around nosiness. Large tech companies want to maximize profit and any company that deals in information or software wants more information. If a company can make you existing item obsolete, many times they will. For example, Livermore, CA has a firehouse with a hundred year old light bulb. Except to move it or a power outage, its been operating since 1901. One hundred twenty five years. How many other bulbs have been changed in that same building? If all products were designed to last forever, we would only change them when they went out of style, or a natural disaster.
Planned Obsolescence, I’m sure is a term you have heard and its a very real thing. My opinion is that the recent solid operating system with a ten in it’s name and the shortages of hardware coinciding with an Artificial Intelligence boom were not by accident. Perfectly serviceable hardware that would be of great use during a product shortage is now obsolete. The information company’s new product excludes that same older hardware. They can’t collect the same amount of information on you to train, you guessed it, AI.
But Why?
Currently the Western world is in a state where the fear of missing out is a real thing. We want the newest mobile phone or the biggest TV. We need to keep up with everyone else, and we post it all, for everyone to see. It’s almost mandatory to prove our worth to others. It’s what large corporations count on, so they find ways to make that happen.
They emphasize that if you don’t have the new product, their new product, you’re missing out. You will fall behind. No one wants to fall behind, so you enter the vicious cycle and buy the next new thing. Consequently, they make the next new thing allowing the large companies to make something that still works, obsolete.
Enter where we are today. Some large companies, in an effort to get more of your information, find themselves impeded by the very thing they tried to promote. In the case of a company that sells a very popular Operating System, I don’t need to name names, they have rendered a massive amount of older hardware incompatible at the same time component shortages make it difficult to upgrade or buy new PCs.
I don’t think this was an accident. Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist, but when you make older products non functioning and new hardware is expensive due to shortages for AI, corporations have a huge opportunity to profit off us while telling us it’s in our own best interest. Greed. Greed for profit on new parts and greed for your information so they can train AI to ‘give you what you want’.
What choice do we have?
Part of it is simple. If your tech does what you need it to do, wait out the rush and them pushing the narrative that you will miss out. They need everyone’s help, let them sweeten the deal. If you do end up missing something, maybe you didn’t really need it.
Another option is find a way to make do with a little less. Systems I build now may only have 16GB of RAM instead of 32, or maybe you can size down on storage until prices adjust. They need us to buy, and although they will get the eager, or maybe the desperate, a calm demeanor and a little patience may work to our advantage. It will eventually bring prices back down, and it may signal to some that we don’t really want them having all of our information; we can make our own decisions without AI’s help.
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