I am thankful that I have witnessed some of the most significant advances in technology in my lifetime; moon landing, the internet, smartphone and DNA analysis just to name a few. The next revolution will involve Artificial Intelligence (AI) in every aspect of our lives. Even without AI, I often feel overwhelmed by recent advances in technology and wonder if we, especially the older folks, are going backwards in terms of our convenience and expenditure with all the new innovations.

I will give several examples from my daily life to make the point. My first gripe is about the invasion of “apps”. Every business wants their app installed on our cell phone. The stated reason is to offer us convenience, but it gets confusing and time-consuming when we need to navigate through dozens of apps; it also overloads the memory of the phone and forces us to buy more storage. I especially dislike apps of grocery stores and crave the old days when I could just use a store card to get the sale price instead of fumbling through choices and clicks. I often do not even take advantage of the sale prices. Cars are becoming incredibly advanced in using technology.

While some recent features related to safety are great, other features only cause anxiety and expense even though the intentions might have been good. I had a car with slick push buttons to open doors instead of traditional mechanical handles. Suddenly, one button stopped functioning. My only choice was to go to the dealership and pay close to $200. Mechanical handles used to last forever. I made sure that my next car had mechanical handles. Newer cars no longer come with spare tires. The stated reasons are to increase trunk space and fuel efficiency by reducing weight.

It is unnerving for me to go on a long-distance trip without a spare tire. Cars have stopped providing DVD players with the radio. If one wants to listen to one’s favourite songs one must rely on a cell phone and “Bluetooth”. I am tempted to replace my car radio with a DVD player and keep a spare tire anyway. All companies are going away from providing instruction manuals, printed on paper. Now it is all on their website or accessible on cellphone using a QR code.

Call me old-fashioned but I prefer flipping through pages to the right information as opposed to navigating on a computer or phone screen using various toolbars, side bars and icons. The companies save money by reducing the cost of printing the manuals and can also preach their goal about saving trees. Only the customers are inconvenienced. Speaking of companies improving their bottom line, all customer services of all companies have now been automated, which does not help the customers at all if the problem requires a detailed explanation. If the customer insists on talking to a person, he/she will end up talking to either a ChatGPT robot or someone from a country like the Philippines or Guatemala who can barely speak English. Controls for electronic devices and home appliances are getting increasingly more complex. There are so many options it is easy to get confused while pushing the buttons to perform a specific function.

Of course, it is not difficult to perform those tasks if the instruction manuals are handy, but without manuals they defy common sense. Also, there is no standardization; operation of a Samsung TV can be entirely different from a Toshiba TV, for example. My other gripe is about the font size of instructions. As the sizes of all devices get smaller and smaller, so do the letters in any instructions, often requiring a reading glass. The idea of running cars and appliances without human involvement scares me. If the point is that a robot with all the relevant sensors can perform in the same way as a human being, I get it. What worries me are unexpected events, components not working properly because of age or fatigue and lack of instantaneous communications.

I miss those days when I could look at my photo albums by myself or with others and reminisce about past events. Now, I am overloaded with hundreds if not thousands of photos on my cell phone. I do not like looking at a computer screen or smartphone screen. I typically print out a selected few and paste them in an album just like the old days. The same thing happens when I want to watch a movie. It is not just the “pay per view”; now I am bombarded with “streaming services” from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon etc. who not only stream hit movies but produce their own. I get overwhelmed by choices and end up watching old movies on some classic movie channel.

I suspect that the reason for all these advances is the burning desire of the young engineers to use their innovative minds with encouragement and incentives from their employers to help the customers. The real reason for the employers is improving their bottom lines. My belief is that the younger engineers do not have enough life experience to consider if their products are being useful to all customers, especially the ones who are older and/or live in rural environments and lack a global perspective about what can possibly go wrong (a disruption in supply chain caused by war, for example). Inconvenience and added expenditure are one thing but all high-tech companies now seem to be engaged in spying on us and monitoring our activities.

Their goal is to learn our tastes and spending habits so that they can market their products to us better. Just say loudly in your living room that you are planning to buy an item XYZ. Next day, ads will pop up on the screen telling you where you can buy XYZ. How do the companies do it? We have allowed, perhaps without realizing, several devices which can pick up our private conversations: Alexa and cell phone just to name two. This aspect of advance in technology is both creepy and worrisome. It is only going to get worse with a full-scale invasion of AI. I feel like throwing away my smart phone and going back to dial-up home phones. One of my friends summarized it best by saying that “If necessity is the mother of invention, making a buck is the father of invention”.

I am not against clever marketing schemes, but I worry about what would happen if the technology fell into the wrong hands. Identity theft, electronic depletion of bank accounts, publicizing of health issues and other private matters, political persecution are just some immediate concerns which are already happening. Advances in technology are causing me inconvenience, unnecessary expenses and anxiety. As a result, I am living how I used to live thirty or forty years ago by avoiding most new features. I feel that I am no longer in control; there are too many predetermined options.

I can imagine a day when technology will eventually strip us of our material possessions, private information and even thought processes; we will have nothing to hide and will all become completely transparent. This will be the ultimate in going back – going back to the caveman days. The conspiracy theorists speculate that this is all by design so that the elusive “Illuminati” can control all of us like a bunch of cavemen zombies.

(The writer, a physicist who worked in industry and academia, is a Bengali settled in America.)