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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 parrots 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>
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