Extravagancy in Tech

I’ve started to ponder the repercussions of this trend of extravagant architectural choices in the tech industry. But unfortunately, these options seem prevalent in this current era of cloud computing. At least, I seem to stumble upon these regularly when working with a wide variety of distributed systems. Great examples of this kind of trend are various Kubernetes setups in projects where you could easily manage to progress without it or some data infrastructure solution that feels like a sledgehammer for hitting a small nail.

I’m not bashing these technologies since I enjoy working with them, and I work with them daily. They have their purpose, but this purpose is often meant for a larger picture in mind. Now, if we focus on the example of Kubernetes, sure, it can bring many benefits, like easier deployments, reduced complexity on large projects, and often reduced costs. But no one can argue that it can be overkill in many projects. If it’s not needed, it mainly brings unnecessary complexity and reduces productivity in these projects. So it can be a double-edged sword. But I don’t want to focus on these singular technologies in this topic since they feel minor on the grand scale.

Implications on Our Evolution

When we move more to this science-fiction picture of the future, we need to start thinking more about topics such as transhumanism and how we will live with machines that’ll outsmart us. Understandably, issues associated with transhumanism, like the singularity, AI, nanotechnologies, cybernetics, and much more, are challenging to discuss, first of all, on a technological level and on a moral and ethical level. But, on the other hand, it is also hard to say that we will even ever see the rise of these kinds of technologies. It could be that our civilization can see that these inventions are possible, but we cannot implement these. On the other hand, it could also be that technological evolution has also started to get so rapid that we will see a significant turn of events in these topics in the near future. [[https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns][Overall technological evolution grows exponentially, so the time between significant inventions gets shorter and shorter]]. So, we can only speculate on how things might turn out.

Whatever the outcome may be, I believe that some degree of optimism is in place. However, I think the singularity is inevitable, and most of the industry’s actions indicate that the path is not good. These actions are the main reason why these over-the-top architectural choices might hint at something that might be inevitably bad.

When I talk about some projects using these “sledgehammer” solutions in projects where they aren’t necessary, I’m overall talking about a small pesky thing. What worries me about this topic is that we are using these kinds of hyped-up tools, which happen to be the month’s flavour in every project; what could this mean, for example, in the development of AI or other future technologies? Could we seem to have endless resources cause of something that cannot be reverted? Bill Joy wrote a great essay about the future not needing us, which makes it scary to think that we run these extravagant systems just mainly because we can. A similar thing applies to data collection and many other issues in privacy. Most big platforms that utilize some tracking tend to collect a lot of data, which often isn’t used thoroughly, so the data is collected to build minimal information about the user. Possibly the rest are saved for later.

Clever Usage of Limited Resources

Back in the olden days, when I wasn’t even born, computers tended to be understandably very limited in terms of resources. Computing has evolved tremendously since allowing us to use these kinds of larger-than-life solutions in environments where they wouldn’t necessarily be needed. Has the quality of systems or programs evolved directly proportional to the increase in computing power? Definitely not. The fact that these kinds of powers are available to us everywhere has possibly increased the number of innovations since more people can start thinking of possible uses for these machines that are all around us because they are in contact with them regularly. Although you could think that since more people are in contact with these machines daily, it would equal more interest in programming, etc. This doesn’t seem to be the case.

Where I’m getting with this is the fact that the quality tends to be going down when we go towards the future; how could this be tackled? Clearly, this kind of wild west design in these crucial systems can’t continue.

Strategic Approach in the Development

When we talk about this extravagancy phenomenon in tech projects, it tends to affect the program/system developers the most. Often, they are not making these decisions since it tends to be someone from the ivory tower who often plans these decisions. Thankfully, these people have at least some background in these systems relatively frequently but not always. So should the developer’s opinions matter more when considering various options for your project? Sun Microsystems had a great idea when they marketed Java to people. Sun was a hardware company that figured out that they had to please programmers first to sell more hardware, which resulted in Java being one of the most widely used languages today. Now, did Java please programmers? Maybe back when people hated C++, but opinions seem to have shifted recently, although both languages still enjoy immense support.

Overall, I think these large systems have their places in many domains, but these domains where their power could use efficiently are very rare. This ends up in a situation where we either have a lot of unnecessary computing power just lying there or used for something unnecessary. Now systems have this unnecessary complexity that mainly hinders the people’s workflow in developing the whole system.

I also think that doing something because “this might be needed in the future” is a bad practice since this tends to end up in an infinite loop of unnecessary work. Since more straightforward solutions tend to be quite often good enough for most projects with much better developer experience and much better efficiency. These solutions also often allow effortless migration to a bigger and better solution if needed. So don’t optimize if it’s not necessary.