peterrenshaw , 6 months ago to random

“There’s a common misconception that state-of-the-art technology has to be expensive, energy consumptive and hard to engineer. That’s because we have been persuaded to believe that #InnovativeTechnology is whatever bombastic billionaires claim it is, whether that’s commercial #spacecraft or the endless iterations of generative #AItools.

As the #Canadian #technologist and #engineer #UrsulaFranklin once said, fantasies of technology would have it that innovation is always “investment-driven, shiny, lab-born, experimental, exciting”. But more often than not, in the real world, it is “#NeedsDriven, #scrappy, on #location, #iterative, #practical, #mundane”.

The real pioneering #technologies of today are genuinely useful #systems I like to call “frugal tech”, and they are brought to life not by eccentric billionaires but by people doing more with less. They don’t impose #TopDown “#solutions” that seem to complicate our lives while making a few people very rich. It turns out that genuinely #innovative #technology really can set people free.” — Eleanor Drage

#OpEd / #EleanorDrage / #tech / #FrugalTech / #Cambridge #LeverhulmeCentre / #FutureOfIntelligence <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/02/billionaire-big-tech-frugal-elon-musk-innovation>