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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
ajroach42@retro.social ("Andrew (making toys)") wrote:
I got lots of responses pointing out technologies that had to be forced on people. I've thought about them. The ones I agree with are:
- Internal Combustion Cars
- Telephones
- LLMs and GenAIThe internal combustion engine in general didn't have to be forced on to people (farmers, for example, loved it both for their tractors and also for other makeshift machines they'd construct around their farms)
Cars as a class didn't have to be forced on people, high society types in big cities loved having electric carriages. They were clean, easy to maintain, and quiet. They were also reliable enough that they didn't get replaced often enough to become an industry.
But, while the rich were driving around in their electric carriages and the poor were walking, taking horse-carriages, taking trains, and riding cable cars (and people were experimenting with electric and steam cars) Henry Ford decided that, if he could get the US government to heavily invest in a roadway system and trick a bunch of municipalities into giving up a bunch of green space and pedestrian space to cars, he could make a lot of money while also leaving people responsible for both driving (which is dangerous and should be left to those who are interested in learning how to do it effectively, not a requirement for participation in society) and maintenance (which is expensive, and prior to Ford was largely a public expense for a public good.)
Cars introduced a lot of new freedoms for people, but were perhaps the worst of the several available alternatives to do that in dozens of ways, and we're still trying to overcome that fallout. There were significantly more (and significantly safer!) transit options in my region before cars.
Cars, as I've said before and taken blowback from, are usually bad. They are, at best, a necessary evil. There was a time when they were not necessary.