My theory is that we going solarpunk utopian society but it’s gonna take a long period of cyberpunk dystopia to get there.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 days ago
How far into the future? Cuz it seems more like we are going the opposite way rn.
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 3 days ago
Pierre121000@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I.d.k., 50 years ?
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Even without software lock in making repairs difficult, I imagine the same trends of the past century will continue. Repair will likely to continue to become more impractical. It’s always going to be easier to automate the production of goods than the repair of goods.
Pierre121000@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
Sure, i’m optimistic
It’s always going to be easier to automate the production of goods than the repair of goods.
We can automate the production of spare parts.
And swapping a part for another is quick and can usually be done by the consumer(, or by a pro if it’s more complex).
Repairing a part is hard, but swapping it is usually easy, unless when the part is difficult to access which doesn’t seem to be an engineering necessity in most cases ?WoodScientist@lemmy.world 3 days ago
We can automate the production of spare parts, but that may not mean much. Look at something as simple as a door. You can buy a door without hinges, cut mortices for it, and hang it in place. Most people instead buy pre-hung doors. The time saved installing the door frame piecemeal is worth the cost of buying a whole manufactured assembly. Yes, some things can easily be replaced. A battery can easily be swapped out if a device is built to allow it. But most components can’t be so easily replaced. And usually it’s not possible to design a device to have every part easily serviceable. You are vastly understating the time and difficulty of repairing things.
Think about the early 20th century, when consumer electronics were simple and designed to be repaired. In that world, most people still didn’t do their own repairs. Most people took their broken devices to repair shops. Even if you have access to spare parts, it takes a lot of time to repair something even as simple as a radio. It took enough effort that it made sense for people to specialize in it and make it their career.
And this will only continue in the future. Automation makes human labor more valuable, not less. Our capabilities to do things increases, but the bottleneck is always human labor. And the more we can produce, the more value those scarce human labor hours have. Unless you can automate the entire repair process, increased automation will make us more likely to throw things away.
And worse, automation makes it easier just to start from scratch. You can always take a broken device, throw it in a crucible with a mountain of other broken devices, and just melt the whole lot down. And automation also gives us cheaper energy, as it makes it cheaper to install ever-more solar panels and batteries.
gibmiser@lemmy.world 3 days ago
… :/
EditsHisComments@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Repaired a TV I found on the sidewalk, paper taped to it said free so mine it was. It’s a FireTV which, have awful designs, but are decent TVs if you have a Prime account already.
But it was a 1hr, $40 backlight job, complete with additional grievances against Amazon. My partner acted like I was a wizard when we were able to watch a movie on it lol