AI Is Becoming a Band-Aid over Bad, Broken Tech Industry Design Choices

I feel like most things degrade as a matter of scope-creep, while trying to implement features that are actually complex and non-trivial.

Take the unholy mess of modern Microsoft Office. MS Office might have been a good tool for a single purpose back in the 80s, but the addition of multiple generation/layers of features that have been halfway abandoned but kept for compatibilitys sake, make any more complex task non-trivial. There are multiple approaches for implementing templating MS Word, none of which are really good. MS Macros have been great... if you are trying to get arbitrary code execution on Windows machines. And collaboretive editing features include halfway abandoned sharing features and a half-baked Web Version of Office 365.

As a matter of fact I don't believe this is purely out of corporate greed, but rather a lack of scope limitation during design. People don't ask if they should, if they simply can do. We shouldn't have macros inside of Text Documents, there should be another tool for that. We shouldn't have SQL queries pulling into Excel Worksheets. We shouldn't use Excel as a database, but people had to change names of biological genes to avoid these being autoformatted in Excel.

But as a matter of fact, in general one is limited to working with the tools one knows, so convincing someone to use the correct tool for a job will always be harder than just delivering additional features, that we know will make the overall product worse.

We have been trained to hoard apps and files, while tech companies have failed to provide any intuitive or easy way to organize them. And their solution isn’t to make things more organized or usable. No, our technological overlords have decided that disorganized chaos is fine as long as they can provide an automated search product to sift through the mess.

Ugh. Who's the teen writing for Scientific American?

This same complaint was made back in the oughts about search. "Everyone should just categorize and properly tag documents!"

Turns out users hate that.

It’s about time someone pointed this out. Look at all the things phones got rid of in their UI:

• Clustering of icons on a desktop
• Application windowing
• Preferences located inside an application

(It also gives up a lot of context-based right-clicking, but I personally consider the right-click a bad UI design choice.)

Some things, like folders, are only barely implemented, with a host of features that we’ve had for decades removed. Ever tried to sort a phone group by creation date?

I’m writing this on an iPad, which I would love to use as my daily driver, but because it runs iPad OS, there are so many productivity and organizational features missing relative to Mac OS that I do most important things on the laptop.

I think the AI part of the article title is a bit of a clickbait, from the way I read it, the article was primarily focused on the reduction of usability in tech products due to the "growth oriented" mindset of tech companies adding more and more bloated features and ads for more profit, for which AI is a part of.

The "everything looks like a nail" part of tech oriented people that I could never understand: I've known people, real, very smart, people, who thinks more tech will solve every single problem in the universe by predicting then replacing the human with the omnipotent big data and machine learning; If the problem wasn't solved, that's because there wasn't enough data for the model and you simply need to gather more data and add more tracking to everything, instead of looking for a simpler, low tech solution.

I'm frustrated, because (correct me if I'm wrong) this kind of mindset seems to be common in the tech industry, the idea that automation and improvements in technology is ultimately imagined as means to eventually achieve a substitute for humanity in the form of the almighty dollar, instead of used to help humanity achieve more with less. I would expect it from companies, but not from real people.

This article is seriously complaining that Apple added search to the iPhone? The device consumers increasingly expect to do everything for them, instantly? He’s mad that Google is summarizing search results now because it’s so dominant that everyone tries to game their results algorithm? Writing this article was the only bad, broken choice here.

Complaining about AI in all the wrong ways to complain about AI. AI is definitely a poor substitute for actually well thought out feature implementations. But it has nothing to do with why your iPhone sucks to navigate on.

AI is not even a band-aid, it's just the latest shiny toy to use as a selling point and boost stock price. Sure, you'll get features like search that could have already been implemented perfectly fine, and perhaps better, without this new version of AI, but the actual features aren't the main reason for going all-in on AI. The pursuit of ever-higher profits demands that sales continue to increase. Since phones have gotten "good enough" for virtually all use cases that the average user has, phone manufacturers were scrambling to come up with a reason to throw out your old phone to get a new one. AI has become an integral part of that. Whether it actually results in more sales remains to be seen.

I wonder when they'll use AI in response to missing headphone jacks. (dropping them was like if you amputated your legs just because cars and electric wheelchairs exist)