"New and improved" is now an oxymoron. Every single day my cell phone tells me that 10 or
Brain on technology
© TechinfographicsThis is your brain on technology. Get help.
20 apps have been "updated" and none of them ever work better. Instead, a phone that worked perfectly when I got it now tells me, 10 to 20 times a day, "Unfortunately, Moto has stopped." The operating rule in technology for years now has been, if it isn't broke, graft something onto it so we can advertise it as new and improved.

Why does every coffee maker come with a clock? Because consumers have been banging their pitchforks on the iron gates of the appliance companies, chanting "We want clocks!"? No. They do it because they can. Likewise with variable-strength settings, and delayed-start. Now they're connecting the coffee pots to the Internet of Things so we can talk to them about coffee with our smartphones. I don't want to discuss coffee with my coffee pot. I just want a damn cup of coffee..

Okay the examples so far are trivial. These aren't:
  • More cars broke down and stranded their occupants on the road in 2015 than in any year on record. The main culprit, according to AAA: technology.
  • Farmers in several states are campaigning to win the right to repair their own machines, while manufacturers claim the farmers only lease the technology that makes the thing run, and any problem has to be handled by a certified technician in a company-owned service center. Tell a farmer that when, in harvest time, his $400,000 combine is sitting silent in a field containing his annual income for lack of a 100-dollar oxygen sensor. Then step back.
  • Long-haul truckers are desperate to escape the rising costs of technology — some of it mandated to control emissions. "The engines and drive trains of these new trucks are good for a million miles, easy," one operator told me. "But the technology starts shutting them down after about 20,000 miles." Nothing like having a refrigerated 18-wheeler stopped on an Interstate ramp in Florida because a crankshaft-position sensor is hallucinating.
  • Now comes the Internet of Things, featuring devices connected to the Internet via your Wifi system so you can use your smart phone to feed your dog, adjust the thermostat in your empty house, adjust your refrigerator temperature (something I personally have not done more than twice in 50 years), adjust the lighting in your empty house, and other necessary things.
There is no question that automobiles, for example, are far better today than they were 30 years ago, mainly because of improvements in the machining of engine and drive-train parts. We used to have to drive a car a thousand miles at painfully slow speeds to "seat" the valves and rings and bearings, which meant, let them bang against each other until they fit better. Even when properly broken in, and most of us didn't wait to exceed 60 miles per hour, it was rare for an engine to last 100,000 miles. Now, precision tools have done away with the break-in period, and at least tripled the life expectancy of engines. Score one for technology.

Now consider the matter of the ignition key. Was this a huge problem? Were people calling customer service and demanding a black box with a battery in it to carry around, instead of a key?

Never mind. Here's your black box, because the engineers are proud of it and the marketers think it has legs. Forget about worrying where your keys are, just leave the box in the car. (Whoops. Kills the car battery. Which disables the car locks. Which you need to operate to get at the battery. Snag.) Okay, leave it on a shelf inside the house. (Which might be close enough to the car to allow you to start it and leave, not discovering that you don't have the box until you get where you're going and shut off the car. Snag.)

As we patch and fix and tinker to deal with such unintended consequences, and add on the newest insane ideas of the engineers, the software required to run a car has become bloated and bug-bitten. It takes 100 million lines of software to get you on your way. All of Facebook operates on 60 million lines.

In fact, according to a new book Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, the sheer size of these programs, with their fixes and patches and now interactions over Wifi and Internet networks, is exceeding the ability of the human mind to comprehend them. Hmm. Sounds like it's time for driverless cars. What could go wrong?

Moreover, the opportunities for malware have been increased by orders of magnitude. It is now possible to insert an infected CD in a car's player which, when played, will disable the car's brakes.

And the growth goes on. In every field of endeavor, the engineers and the marketers high-five each other every time they come up with some new feature that nobody needs, but everybody can be convinced they ought to have. ("No, really! It's not a bug, it's a feature!")

There is nothing in nature that grows continuously except cancerous tumors that eventually kill their hosts. That is what technology is doing now — getting so big and ponderous that it is beginning to endanger the systems it was supposed to be helping.