Techtopian Plans are Insane

A couple of days ago a line of severe thunderstorms swept through my area. A couple of weak tornadoes possibly touched down in a couple of places and did major damage to trees and some property. The power was out at my house for about 30 hours, and whenever the power goes out here, we lose our wired Internet connection, and apparently the 5G network uses the same network infrastructure because that goes down too.

We have a fancy natural gas fired generator that kicks on automatically when the grid goes down, but all our entertainment and gadgets won't work without the Internet, so it's like living in 2006 or something. I can't do my job because that's all over the Internet, and in the evenings we watch DVDs instead of streaming.

The local stores that rely on networks can't function. The stores that have no backup for their credit card networks don't really function. The grocery store has to throw away all their cold and frozen food. It's a big mess.

When the power goes out like that, it's very obvious that the idea of smart cities and more tech infrastructure dependent systems is just stupid and lots of the plans aren't even remotely viable. For example, there will supposedly be time synced (down to the microsecond) distributed networks that transmit video from moving cars to a data center, where centralized "AI" self driving systems will control traffic.... yeah, no. that's not going to happen in real life. It might work in some controlled lab environment, but in the real world, it's just not going to work at all.

Maybe top level engineers can keep such a system working under ideal conditions, but the average people who will actually be trying to maintain and operate those systems won't be able to and the conditions will depart significantly from ideal.

It doesn't seem feasible or economical for wireless telecom companies to provide very high reliability networks like the phone company used to back in the old days. The whole wired telephone network was backed up with battery power, for example. My network provider removed the battery backup from all their switches and repeaters many years ago because the cost to maintain all that was too high. They obviously don't have generators on standby throughout their network either.

I work in the telecom industry, and it gets more obvious with every passing year that tech is going to go through a long painful period of contraction and restructuring. People don't really want or need the systems the tech industry is trying to sell.