The Fixed Point Of Extinction
Are we as a society mistakenly optimising our way to banality and unhealthiness purely in the pursuit of profit?
I worry about capitalism, I think we all do but are reluctant to admit it in polite company. Although it has lifted millions out of poverty, enabled great and wonderful technological progress, and all the other things, there remains one emergent problem with its fairly recent evolution — optimisation.
If you’re a denizen of the Grand Game of Software Engineering, just like me, then you’ll be familiar with how optimisation works, i.e. making things more efficient in terms of memory size, execution speed, resource allocation, and any number of parameters depending upon the system under study.
With capitalism it’s usually optimisation for price, making things as cheaply and commonly as efficiently as possible. But, this often has the side effect that as things become cheaper they tend to be of lower quality and the cost to replace them rapidly becomes cheaper than the time and cost spent trying to repair them.
You know the sort of thing, where, for example, a washing machine may cost €150 to repair but a new one can be had for just an extra €50 — and the new one just looks so shiny and modern on the ads, the neighbours have one too, and look, it’s got WiFi, it plays a charming tune when the cycle finishes…
