CONVENIENCE BECOMING INCONVENIENT

Convenient things are nice things. Until they aren’t. Read about how too much convenience is not only annoying, but harmful.

The Path of (Least) Resistance

Nowadays, ”convenience” as a broad term is commonplace. Hungry but lazy? You can order food to your longitude and latitude with an app. Angry but lazy? You can order an orbital strike to your longitude and latitude with an app. No- wait, we’re not at that point yet.

Basically, it is very easy to do certain things; or in other words, convenient. Typically, convenient things are nice things. Is it inconvenient to get to town square? Build a bridge over that river. Turning wheat into flour is annoying? Invent windmills. The same goes for modern times. Editing an image takes a long time? Program an image editor or add a feature. Going to the library to find one tidbit of information is slow? Create        the internet. 

The endless possibilities within the “Convenient” world.  Graphic by Elliot Cisco

By making things more convenient, they became better. Surely this reasoning will hold true no matter how ”convenient” we make something. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. 

One small example is editing images on phones. If your only goal is to “enhance” a selfie of yourself, that is very easy. Most popups and autosuggestions make it very easy to mostly mindlessly make a picture look “better”. This is, of course, based on the assumption that most users just want to do basic things like taking pictures and cranking up the saturation (which is a good assumption to make).

But what if you want to do literally anything else? You have to take some extra steps to disable what might have been automatically enabled and to step around other things.

“Ok boomer, small inconvenience. So what? The fact that it’s this easy to edit an image nowadays is a testament to our technological progress.” you might be saying. You’re partially right.

Always Has to Be AI, Doesn’t It?

In a market where the majority of users are already using a brand of technology, it’s all about converting people over if you want to show growth. Big tech companies do this by improving their product to make it more attractive, advertise a lot, and... hold on. Why are we doing more stock buybacks? Inflating your value has nothing to do with increasing your user base.

That aside, the competition out there is fierce. You gotta have the most relevant new  thing, the most modern and swift features, the most stupid gradients, and because of AI hype, the most AI AI. After all, you can’t spell “anything” without “AI”. And what can AI do you for you dear consumer? It can do your work for you. It can enhance your productivity so you can be more productive with higher productivity-ness. It can chat with you. It can generate slop art. AI can do everything!

And this is why AI is perfect for the tech industry. It’s a shiny new thing that seems super modern. To keep the hype going for as long as possible, they have to make it as easy as possible to use all this new AI stuff. So that’s why it’s around every corner. Every menu, every screen, and heck, there’s even a dedicated button for it on some devices. Sometimes it’s a popup. Sometimes it’s a huge, distracting, glowing button. Whatever it is, it’s usually annoying.

But that’s actually not the biggest reason why this whole section is here. It’s about the convenience the tools themselves make.

Let’s say you want some art. You could spend a lot of time and effort drawing it yourself, or maybe you could pay somebody else to do that for you. Either way, SLOW. At least, compared to AI. You press a button and it makes it. You didn’t put in any effort, nor does it have any personal style. But it was convenient.

Same goes for writing. Perhaps even... homework assignments. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to know how to. You just press a button.

And this is where convenience can be harmful. It’s so convenient to do these things, but in the process, it made you a little less capable and decreased the overall quality of things. There are studies that show people who use AI just straight up have less brain activity. And what about websites that want more clicks? They can just write articles with AI and not care about the errors, because there’s really no punishment. This floods the internet with erroneous information. AI content is this thing where it can be error ridden yet so hard to tell from normal content. This is why media literacy and critical thinking are so important today.

Sure, maybe you can employ more AI to do broad searches of all the AI content for factual information, but AI is a blurry thing. It won’t exactly help in that situation.

“Wait, did you just indirectly say AI can be useful after ranting about how AI is terrible?” Yes, because AI does have its’ uses. But what a lot of AI is doing now is devaluing our only huge library of information, making people less capable, and replacing genuine art with much more profitable consumer experiences. 

Summary and Opinion

Super convenient things make other tasks seem comparably harder. I do agree that in our changing world, technology does make other things irrelevant sometimes, and that technology that makes things easier is bound to be created. Despite this, companies have still found a way to hyper min-max exploiting the human mind for their gain. 

At what point can you call something a tool when you’re barely using it, and it’s doing        so much?

There are still other examples of convenience being harmful. Social media uses it to keep you scrolling. Casinos and online sports betting (because, yes, they are practically the same thing) use it to make you throw your money at them. There are probably more.

Convenient things are nice things. This is true. But if you make things too convenient, they can become bad.