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+---
+layout: post.njk
+title: The Curse of Convenience
+tags: post 
+date: 2024-03-12
+---
+<h4>From food to software, convenience has a cost</h4>
+<p>Food production has been made invisible to us in modern society. We
+buy ingredients from the supermarket, where fruits and veggies have
+magically showed up. This adds a lot of convenience to our lives, we do
+not have to concern ourselves with how things are made. We get to buy
+them anywhere and anytime, whatever types of food we want regardless of
+whether they are in season or not.</p>
+<p>This is all well and good, with our ever-growing busy schedules and
+things we need to do. Not having another item that we need to care about
+is great. We can now focus more on the other things that happen in our
+life.</p>
+<p>However, this has consequences. We do not see how food products are
+made, how the farmers who produced them are treated, how the animals are
+treated, how monoculture destroys land, how importing food half across
+the world impacts the environment and how toxins make their way into the
+consumables that we eat.</p>
+<p>Our lack of knowledge enables companies to get away with neglect and
+abusive practices. The other day I learned that many of Europe’s
+supermarket canned tomatoes are actually produced by <a
+href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ordThf9eDMA">the Italian mafia
+using modern slave labour</a>. My girlfriend has brought to my attention
+the potential consequences of convenience, and now we buy more local
+non-processed food, directly from farmers if possible.</p>
+<p>The supermarket often <em>hides</em> from us the complexity and
+impact that goes into growing and making food, and what we gain is
+convenience and accessibility. However, without understanding where that
+food comes from or its impact, we cannot meaningfully make ethical nor
+healthy choices, we cannot understand how what we buy will affect our
+own bodies or the lives of others. In that sense, convenience and the
+abstractions hurt not only us, but the world around us.</p>
+<p>As a software engineer who studied UX design, for a long time my
+mindset has been: the user should not need to learn anything to use what
+I build, I should not make the user think too much. We are told that
+users tend to like these tools, tools that get out of the way and allow
+them to be “lazy”. New tools these days strive for ease of use and
+accessibility. They are scoped down to the essentials; they hide details
+and create whichever metaphors, false or not, that make it easy to learn
+and use what we build.</p>
+<p>But metaphors are important, and so I will digress briefly to address
+the use of metaphors within the mindset of convenience and
+ease-of-use.</p>
+<p>Metaphors serve as a way for us to quickly understand how the world
+functions, by relating it to concepts that we already understand. Files
+and folders, internet as a web, email as mail. Just by name, metaphors
+allow us to quickly grasp advanced concepts. However, today’s metaphors
+of LLMs as chat assistants convey to many that they are almost sentient.
+This is not so strange, when we use metaphors like “Siri” or terms like
+“hallucinate”. Metaphors turn into extended metaphors, and become
+disconnected and incoherent, to the point of being misleading. Easier to
+understand? Yes, but at what cost? Even in tech literate circles, I see
+people seriously arguing that since LLMs learn like a human (false),
+LLMs should have the same fair use laws as us. These broken metaphors
+can end up having profound impacts of our lives. Seeing LLMs as
+stochastic parrot vs sentient superhumans makes a huge difference for
+how we want it regulated and how we interact with it.</p>
+<p>This focus on convenience, ease-of-learning and ease-of-use, is in
+many ways a great leap forward in the way we build software. These days
+we do not need to decode cryptic error messages or read manuals when
+using software. Software is so simple that even a toddler can pick up an
+iPhone and use it. Systems are abstracted away: the user does not need
+to understand how code works, where their data is stored, who gets to
+look at the data they provide, the effort that went into building the
+product and the cost of running it. Most people probably do not realize
+how software is built on the <a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/">shoulder
+of giants</a>, or rather, on the shoulder of a lone open source
+developer who barely gets paid.</p>
+<p>And then, what is a benefit in the short term, lends itself to a
+crisis for the user and society in the long run. The <a
+href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/ai-internet-carbon-footprint/">environmental
+footprint of the web is now on par with the aviation industry</a>, AI
+companies have <a
+href="https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/">horrifying
+working conditions for the people moderating data sets used by LLMs</a>.
+With the insane compute costs of LLMs, I see the environmental
+footprints only becoming worse. Today, we are offered so many services
+for free, without really understanding or needing to care about the
+hidden costs. We can upload videos to YouTube, we can upload reels and
+photos to Instagram, all without paying anything. We get feeds of
+content that are generated for us, that we spend an unhealthy amount
+watching without really knowing what it will do <a
+href="https://theoxfordblue.co.uk/tiktok-and-the-death-of-the-attention-span/">to
+our attention spans</a> in the long run. Everything is abstracted away,
+appearing to be almost magical. It encourages us to be wasteful and has
+unknown health effects.</p>
+<p>Now, we are starting to see studies indicating that <a
+href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/11/16/todays-kids-may-be-digital-natives-new-study-shows-they-arent-close-being-computer-literate/">tech
+literacy is dropping in the younger generations</a>. Lowered tech
+literacy means that users are less empowered to question and change
+status quo of the web. Without users understanding what is happening in
+their computers, how systems work, where their data goes, users can not
+meaningfully discern the costs of their actions- nor are they empowered
+to seek out alternatives.</p>
+<p>This should all signal that we need to change the ways that we build
+software. The goal can not be to simplify endlessly, but to instead
+sometimes go through the effort of teaching and informing the user of
+what is going on.</p>
+<p>My message is not that we should ignore accessibility or ease-of-use.
+What I want us to do is exercise caution. Maybe instead of simplifying,
+let’s try to encourage interest in how things work, let’s allow users to
+poke around into the source code. Let’s talk about the importance of
+performant software, so that users do not just blame hardware. Let’s
+enable users to seek alternatives and exercise digital agency through
+discussion of laws like Digital Markets act and GDPR.</p>
+<p>Yes, software should be easy-to-use and accessible, but not if it
+means that we disempower users and if our practices are unsustainable.
+We need to promulgate simple and performant software, that is
+transparent of its impact and empowers users with agency. I brought up
+the example of agriculture in the beginning, because I think the
+software industry is making the same mistake as that industry and we can
+learn from them. Convenience should not be the end goal; it should be
+empowerment, community and sustainability for users and society at
+large.</p>