Technology was supposed to make life easier. Instead, it has made life faster, louder, more dependent, and, too often, more exhausting.

This may sound like another article about AI, but it is really about something older and larger. AI is simply the newest layer in a familiar story: each generation is promised that technology will simplify life, save time, and reduce friction. Lived experience often tells a different tale.

The title is deliberate. Convenience was the promise that accompanied modern technology: less effort, less delay, less friction. Yet what was presented as liberation has too often become the opposite – a system that consumes time, thins patience, and insinuates itself into nearly every corner of ordinary life.

The computer and the buggy whip make a useful comparison. The automobile did not merely improve transportation; it swept away an entire world of stables, carriage makers, and whip manufacturers. In much the same way, the computer did not simply refine old systems. It replaced them, reordered them, and made escape from them increasingly difficult. From Babbage’s Analytical Engine to ENIAC – the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, one of the earliest general-purpose electronic digital computers – and beyond, computing changed more than our methods; it changed our sense of what now counts as normal.

I learned math and science on a slide rule – yes, I am that old – which may explain why I remain suspicious of the modern habit of treating every new device as proof of progress.

Progress is never a free gift. Every new tool opens one door by closing another, and every gain arrives carrying a cost. The problem is not change itself; the problem is pretending the losses do not count.

We were promised that technology – especially computers – would simplify life. Instead, it has often multiplied our choices, our interruptions, and our dependence. This is not merely personal irritation. It is a pattern so common it has become almost invisible: technology saves institutions time while charging the cost to individuals.

We no longer simply use our tools; increasingly, we submit to them. We repair less, read less deeply, talk less face-to-face, and outsource more memory, judgment, and even expression to devices that promise convenience while quietly teaching dependence.

Technology is now so pervasive that it is difficult to name any part of life untouched by it. Production, marketing, sales, service, communication, entertainment, transportation, banking, education – even the simplest daily tasksvnow pass through digital systems somewhere along the chain. We are not merely using technology; we are living inside it.

What began as convenience has, in many cases, hardened into requirement. It is one thing to choose a digital tool because it is useful; it is another to discover that the tool is no longer optional. Airline boarding passes, bank alerts, medical portals, two-factor codes, service requests, restaurant menus, parking payments, event tickets, insurance forms, and government notices increasingly assume a device, a connection, a password, and a level of digital fluency that many people do not have. The language of convenience remains, but the reality is compulsion. The user is told a system is easier while being quietly stripped of the ability to decline it.

That shift matters because optional tools behave differently from mandatory systems. A tool we may put down remains our servant. A system we cannot avoid becomes part of the environment itself. It shapes our behavior, narrows our choices, and eventually teaches us to regard its limitations as normal. We stop asking whether a process is sensible and begin asking only how to endure it. At that point, convenience has ceased to be a benefit and has become a form of quiet discipline.

The Amish are not a blueprint for modern life, and I am not suggesting anyone abandon the world and hitch up a horse. But they do offer a useful contrast. They remind us that convenience is not the same as wisdom, and that a life can be functional, dignified, and communal without surrendering every task to a machine.

Not long ago, I spent more than an hour trapped in the now-familiar purgatory of automated prompts and voice-recognition systems that neither understood the problem nor solved it. Every path curved back to the same dead end: “Press 0 for customer service,” followed by the same loop once more.

And then comes the final insult: you select English, only to be routed to someone who cannot clearly communicate in it.

Then there is the cellphone – the six-inch shrine to modern convenience that has somehow become the preferred portal for everything. Forms, banking, maps, tickets, messages, passwords, customer service, identity verification: all of it has been compressed onto a screen too small for the task and too essential to avoid.

When Convenience Fails

A recent bank-card activation made the problem painfully clear. I called the number on the card and was immediately offered the modern alternative: handle it there or let them text me a link so I could finish the job on my cellphone. Forty-five minutes later, I was still stranded inside a broken automated system that kept depositing me back at the beginning of the same loop. What had been marketed as efficiency was, in practice, delay dressed as innovation.

The same pattern appeared when I tried to resolve a denied payment. Reaching a real person took far too long, despite a supposedly short queue. I finally abandoned the phone for the online queue – because the recorded message insisted it would be faster – only to wait there almost as long and be timed out repeatedly. In the end, the problem came down to errors in the company’s own system. Their technical failure became my unpaid labor.

Here is the deeper issue. Businesses adopt automation to save money, increase throughput, and reduce staffing pressure. From their point of view, the logic is impeccable. But what is efficient for the institution is often punishing for the customer. The company keeps the savings; the individual absorbs the friction, the confusion, and the lost time. We are told we are valued customers while being treated like queue-management problems.

There is also a moral dimension to this transformation that is easy to miss because it hides inside routine. Bad systems do not merely waste time; they wear people down. They ask for the same information twice, route a simple matter through six screens, and make the resolution of basic errors feel like a test of stamina. Over time, that teaches a small but corrosive lesson: your time is cheap, your attention is available for the taking, and your frustration is a cost the institution is willing to impose. We have normalized a great deal of low-grade disrespect in the name of efficiency.

Something similar happens to attention. Digital life does not only mediate tasks; it fragments them. The same device that carries a ticket or a bank alert also carries advertising, distraction, interruption, and the expectation of instant response. One promise of technology was that it would reduce mental load by handling repetitive tasks. Yet many of the systems around us now do the opposite: they break concentration into fragments, scatter thought, and reward a state of perpetual partial attention. The result is not merely inconvenience but a thinning of inward life.

Nor is the cost distributed evenly. For the highly paid, the digitally fluent, and the professionally insulated, friction can often be bypassed or delegated. For the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the overworked, and the merely unlucky, it cannot. A society that routes basic services through brittle interfaces and endless authentication does not become more advanced simply because the interface glows. In many cases, it becomes less humane. A truly modern system would be easier for the most burdened person to use, not only for the most technically confident.

Banking is hardly alone. This logic has spread through nearly every industry. Switching providers is often so cumbersome that most people endure the irritation rather than escape it. Institutions understand this perfectly. Friction locks customers in.

Why do we tolerate it? Because our choices are limited, the systems are entrenched, and opting out becomes its own punishment. The problem is not the goal of efficiency. The problem is the process. Automation should remove friction, not relocate it from the company to the customer.

There are tasks that still require judgment, context, and human understanding. Customer service is one of them. A phone option tree is not service. An automated attendant is not service. A chatbot that cannot depart from its script is not service. Service begins when a knowledgeable human being can recognize a problem, understand its shape, and help solve it.

I have worked in technology since the early 1970s, which is precisely why I have little patience for shoddy design masquerading as progress. Blaming AI alone is too easy. When these systems fail, the failure is usually not intelligence but judgment – poor priorities, poor design, poor implementation, and too little respect for the user’s time.

Whether AI is truly “creative” depends on how we define creativity. If we judge only by the output, it can appear inventive. If creativity requires intent, experience, risk, and emotional investment, then AI is something else entirely: an astonishing mimic. Used well, it can be helpful. Used badly, it is a wrecking ball swung at problems that needed a screwdriver.

That matters because AI often optimizes toward the acceptable, the average, and the frictionless. It can increase efficiency while flattening originality, narrowing language, and rewarding sameness. We gain speed and lose texture.

Economists have long recognized a version of this problem. The Jevons paradox, first described in the nineteenth century, observes that when a resource becomes more efficient to use, total consumption can rise rather than fall because lower cost invites wider use. Something similar happens with digital technology: tools that promise to save time often tempt institutions to demand more output, faster responses, and permanent availability. Efficiency does not necessarily buy back time; just as often, it raises the baseline.

The original promise of computing was straightforward: let the machine handle mechanical labor so people could reclaim time, attention, and ease. Instead, computers accelerated the tempo of life. They increased the volume of work, raised expectations, and made constant responsiveness seem normal. The promise was convenience; the result was permanent escalation.

This is the pattern behind the broken promise. When a tool makes a task easier, institutions rarely ask how to return time to people. They ask how to extract more output. Efficiency does not usually reduce demands; it resets them upward.

Word processors were supposed to make documents easier to produce. They did. But instead of letting workers go home earlier, organizations demanded more documentation, longer reports, endless revisions, and immediate turnaround. Efficiency did not buy back time; it raised the baseline requirement.

The same escalation is now visible in the physical world. Recent reporting from the International Energy Agency notes that data-center electricity demand surged in 2025 and is projected to keep rising sharply as AI use expands. Even as individual systems become more efficient, total demand can still climb because the scale of use keeps growing. That does not make AI uniquely evil; it simply reminds us that technical efficiency and human benefit are not the same thing.

What brought all of this home was a neighborhood internet outage. I had not realized how many ordinary functions in daily life depended on that invisible connection until they stopped working all at once. That is the clearest measure of dependence: we notice it most sharply when the system fails.

Engineers call it a single point of failure, and modern life has built far too many of them around connectivity. We have traded resilience for convenience and redundancy for speed.

Even something as ordinary as checking traffic directions reveals the absurdity. A complex, interactive map that works reasonably well on a desktop becomes nearly unusable on a phone – yet the assumption is that we will all access it there, often while already in motion. Designers call this progress. Users experience it as compromise.

That is the recurring pattern of the technological age: systems are built around what is possible, scalable, and efficient for the provider, not around what is humane, legible, or practical for the person using them.

Technology is not evil, nor is nostalgia a program for the future. But a tool is only as good as the judgment behind it. When convenience creates dependency, when efficiency erases dignity, and when automation turns every customer into unpaid support staff, something important has gone wrong.

The real failure of modern technology is not that it exists, but that we accepted its promises without demanding better terms. We were told it would save time, reduce frustration, and make life simpler. Instead, too often, it has made us busier, less patient, and more dependent on systems we do not control. If technology is to serve civilization rather than burden it, then human judgment – not mere technical capability – must once again come first.

Recommendations

A critique is not complete unless it can imagine a remedy. If the promise of convenience has been broken, then the task is not to abandon technology but to demand better terms for living with it.

If we want technology to deliver on its original promise, we need to change the terms. First, convenience should be measured by the user’s experience, not the provider’s savings. If a system reduces staffing costs while increasing customer frustration, delays, or unpaid labor, it is not an advance; it is a transfer of burden dressed up as innovation.

Second, human fallback must remain available wherever judgment matters. Customer service, billing disputes, identity problems, medical scheduling, financial errors, and other consequential tasks should never be sealed behind automation alone. A functioning society cannot require people to negotiate with scripts when what they need is understanding, discretion, and accountability.

That principle should extend to measurement as well. We are very good at counting clicks, throughput, response times, and cost reductions. We are much worse at measuring what users actually experience: confusion, delay, abandonment, repeated effort, and the quiet transfer of clerical work from employee to customer. Any organization serious about service should measure those burdens as carefully as it measures efficiency. What gets counted gets managed, and at present the wrong things are too often counted.

Third, systems should be designed for resilience as well as speed. Essential functions ought to have offline alternatives, redundancy, and graceful failure modes. A tool that works brilliantly until the network fails is not robust; it is brittle. Convenience without resilience is merely dependency with better branding.

Fourth, organizations should adopt a simple test before deploying new systems: does this return time, clarity, and dignity to the user, or does it simply extract more compliance and output? That question would eliminate a great deal of bad design. Technology should lighten the human load, not intensify it.

We should also be skeptical of the ideology that every problem is best solved by more automation. Some problems need simplification, not software. Some need staffing, not scripts. Some need trust, discretion, and the authority of a competent human being who can say, “I understand the problem, and here is how we will fix it.” A society that remembers this will build better tools because it will begin from a better question: not what can be automated, but what should remain recognizably human.

Finally, we need to recover the habit of saying no. Not every frictionless process is humane, not every automation is wise, and not every digital convenience is worth the dependency it creates. Repair begins when designers, executives, and users alike insist that technology serve human beings rather than merely scale institutions.

‘The devil you say…’

…for the Amalgamated Heavy

June 11, 2026

~ the Author ~
Charles R. Dickens Was Born in 1951, Is a Veteran of the Vietnam War, for Which He Volunteered, and the Great-Great Grandson of the Noted Author, Whose Name He Shares.

He Is a Fiercely Proud American, Who Still Believes This Is the Greatest Country on the Planet, With Which We’ve Lost Control and Certainly Our Direction. He Grew Up in Moderate Financial Surrounding; We’re Not Rich by Any Stretch, but Didn’t Go Hungry – His Incredibly Hard Working Father Saw to That. As Most From That Era, He Learned About Life From His Father, Whose Story Would Take Too Long to Tell, Other Than to Say That, He Is Also a Fiercely Proud American; A WWII and Korean War, Veteran Marine.

Charlie Was Educated in the Parochial System Which, Demanded That You Actually Learn Something, and Have Capability to Retain It Before You Advance. He Attended Several Universities in Pursuit of a Bachelor’s Degree, and Chased the Goose Further to a Master’s, and Has Retained Some Very Definite Ideas About Education in This Country.

in Addition, Charlie Is a Retired Blues Guitar and Vocalist – a Musician. This Was His Therapy Career. Nothing Brings Him as Much Joy as Playing Music, and He Wishes That He Could Make a Living at It… but Alas… Life Goes on!