Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk about how we are often making changes but those sometimes are unnecessary!

Unnecessarily Reinventing Things

One of the ways that humans are different than other species on the planet is that we, among other things, use technology to build things. There is always a desire for people who are inventing things to also improve things so that they can make better things. That is a really good thing.. most of the time. Sometimes though it's just a large waste of time, money and effort.

With one of the jobs that I do on the side, I get to see people who are trying to use new things or do new things with existing technology. Recently I got to see some people trying to reinvent and change something that has been around for a bit and holy shit it was difficult as hell, and largely seemed like it was a huge waste of time and effort.

I get that there is a need and a desire to improve things. That's an important driving force that gives us all of the incredible things that we have today. There are also a lot of times where that effort is wasted and could have been put to better use elsewhere. I think this is definitely the case that I was working with in that scenario. The people were taking an existing technology and making some changes to it, and the technique that it was used. It was interesting at first, except that it was incredibly specialized and the ONLY person who was able to do it correctly was the person who was teaching the small group that we were working with.

It was incredibly obvious that there was a massive learning curve and it would take a long time for the people who were attempting to learn it, to actually put it into practice. There are plenty of people that can assist one to learn something like this but my issue with the whole thing was, at what point is the effort not worth the cost?

This was one of the only times that I was doing this and felt that this whole exercise was largely a waste of time and resources. I think it's a pretty good ratio considering how long I've been doing it, to only have really experienced the waste of time and resources at that point.

It goes to show though, that what we do and try to improve or implement isn't always a good thing. We can sometimes spend years, lots of money and lots of hours on doing something that has almost no benefit, or no benefit at all. It is definitely challenging for the people involved because there are a lot of times those with financial interests in these things, either through investing or professionally trained but we also have to weigh the cost vs benefit ratio. When something has such a big learning curve that it takes almost a degree itself to get it to work properly, and even then have moderate success, then I think we are heading in the wrong direction.

This can be thought of another way too, with the focus on how governments and bureaucrats focus so much money and effort on massively bloated government programs and policies, we are largely spending massive amounts of money on shit that is nearly entirely useless in the grand scheme of things but instead of making positive development in the right areas, we are wasting time and resources on the wrong things that delay and inhibit the other advances we could be making.

This is how the world works though, because we have a thousand failed changes to one successful change. We mostly don't see these things as end-consumers or end-users because we are largely removed from the process of development, testing and training in a lot of ways. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing in a lot of areas but it can certainly be something to keep in mind as we go forward in the future.

In thinking about this towards the end - how will AI alter this direction I wonder? I know "models" don't always work out and can't be fully realistic but will a bunch of ideas that people have completely die in the advent of AI? Or will we be able to utilize AI to then put in our ideas, some rough calculations and have it help us improve it so that we spend less time in research and development and more time in the design and testing phase? I think that's certainly a notion, though I don't know if that's going to be an advantage yet. In theory it sounds like it would be helpful, but let's hope it is in practice.

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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