Luxury Tech

This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me.

Generally, I don’t like argu­ments of the form

Stop complaining; the modern world is amazing! Life is longer, healthier, more peaceful than ever before! People have never had it so good!!

not because the asser­tions aren’t true — though I do think they are all tricky things to assess — but because the argu­ment is almost always used as a cudgel, basi­cally a ver­sion of “sit down and shut up.”

I don’t think any­body should sit down and shut up — AND — I think many fea­tures of modern life would make a time trav­eler from the past sigh with pleasure. Chief among them are

• modern cooktops, both gas and electric
• refrigerators (I mean!!)
• the humble shower

I don’t know … maybe I’m wrong. They had some pretty great public baths a hun­dred years ago, all over the world. But the imme­diacy and quality of the everyday, basic, hot shower … step aside, AI: here is a technology.

Signed, the blogger who just took a hot shower