Negative trade-offs are not directly related to individual products, but to the technology they depend on and the technology that can follow from them, plus our tendency in capitalistic society to invent whatever can be invented for incremental advantages. For example, AI note taking (benign) requires AI (overall bad) and can imply future technologies (greater surveillance). The bad parts cannot be separated from the good in modern global capitalism because we have no oversight mechanism to do so.
A common rebuttal, but I don't think the tradeoff (on average) is worth it when the technology becomes sufficiently advanced. (Of course, it's worth it for some people, but the resulting technology makes society worse on average.)
And you are forgetting all the destructive technology required to get to the "benign" ones.
I understand exactly what everyone else does here. And nothing intrinsically wrong with that -- technology is unquestionably fun and interesting. I like programming myself. BUT, and this is a huge BUT, I think we as people who are well versed in technology should take a little more responsibility for what we create.
It's an efficient way, but I vehemently disagree with "just". No technology is "just" anything. All of these little "improvements" constitute a very advanced modification of human beings to become more mechanical and less empathetic towards life.
As knowledge becomes more powerful in the sense of enabling us to do more things, it becomes more tempting to use it to gain short-term advantages that typically have long-term detrimental consequences. Such as AI for example, which is too quick at disrupting employment or cheap energy to generate bitcoin but is problematic for local energy grids. The more powerful the knowledge, the easier it is for people to ignore the downsides at the expense of fellow human beings.
That is especially true because we have an economic system that rewards short-term improvements in the efficiency of the system, regardless of the long-term costs. Fossil fuel use, cutting down local forests (has relatively litle short-term impact, but adds up).
And, as we pursue knowledge and technology more vigorously, we slowly lose other forms of gaining knowledge such as a relationship with nature.
Human society is advanced with regard to its knowledge capability, but exceptionally primitive with regard to basic wisdom about community, love, nature, and friendship. We continually donwgrade these things to make way for new technology, and the prisoner's dilemma (tech gives some people advantages, so everyone is pressured to use it), makes it hard to make decisions for the long-run like the Amish do.
With such technology, we are becoming less and less like human beings and more like technological beings augmented with a biological base. I think it's a bad thing because at least the average human being in modern society is not brought up with wisdom, but only the drive to advance technology and operate in a highly capitalistic world.
The augmentation of human beings with tech like this is a proto-type for a dismal world where wisdom is lacking and the pure pursuit of knowledge is becoming a more and more seductive path to destruction.
Well, 2FA was the first step in making devices more entrenched. Passkeys are just the next step. So, it's not exactly passkeys in isolation that is the problem, but the lock-in to technology (and big tech for most people), and passkeys being another discrete but significant step in the process.
My argument was never that tech-savvy individuals won't find a way not to be dependent on big tech. There will always be a few people from the previous era who find a way to be more independent. My argument was only about the majority, about the future of society, and how eventually people won't have much of a choice, because there will be future steps by big tech to integrate more and more people.
> Then you and the people you influence can continue to enjoy getting phished.
Yes, you are quite right (although I have never been phished). But the spirit of your answer is correct. But that was my point: there is no choice, except to be more tightly integrated into tech, which in my opinion is a horrible thing. Instead, we should lessen our dependence on technology so computer accounts aren't so important after all.
> Try to read up about a subject next time before you let your phantasy go wild and scare equally ignorant people away from more secure alternatives.
I am fully aware that passkeys are MORE secure. If you actually read my post, my argument was not TECHNOLOGICAL, but sociological: I argue merely that the tighter dependence on this technology is a bad thing sociologically, even if it is the RIGHT thing technologically.
My thesis is that passkeys are a symptom of tighter tech integration, perhaps an inevitable one. You are irate because passkeys are the better solution to a technical problem, but I nevertheless maintain that the existence of that technical problem itself is merely a side-effect of a much larger problem for society -- the dependence on a tightly-integrated vertical technology stack. So perhaps YOU should read into the subtelty of my argument before claiming that I am ignorant.
That still means dependence on some software product to log-in to basic services. With a password, I don't need to use a software product.
What if I don't want to pay for Bitwarden, or buy a smartphone, or tie my log-ins to my computer? What happens when the WebAuthn standard evolves and only the big-tech companies have solutions for storing passkeys because little software vendors or open-source vendors don't support the standard as well?
What happens when password-based login is phased out because passkeys are SO much simpler...assuming the user acquiesces and signs up for a big tech company's service? Who will be able to choose then?
They sort of solve all these problems with a simpler implementation. But the disadvantage of passkeys is that you are dependent on a tech implementation ecosystem to use them, such as your phone, cloud keychain, etc. In practice, for a lot of people, that will mean tighter dependence on the smartphone, which is rather asinine as people should have the freedom to choose life without a big tech company providing for their needs.
It's good to have options but... I hate passkeys. Here is why:
1. Passkeys are device dependent. That means you need to have more devices and be tied to your existing devices. For a lot of people, that means even tighter phone dependence.
2. Even if you don't use a phone to store your passkeys, they promote vendor lock-in, because you need to rely on Apple, Google, or some other cloud-keychain system to store your passkeys.
Tech companies love passkeys, not because it makes your life better, but because it entrenches people further into relying on their systems. People will love passkeys because it appears simple and makes passwords a thing of the past.
But there's a tradeoff: more dependence on advanced technology are major tech corps. Let me ask you this: suppose you want to go phone-free and big-tech company free. Or you lose your phone and computer overseas. If you only use a passkey, then you'll have to grovel back to Apple or Google to log into your fastmail. Tech corps love that.
This is just one step to make people tied to big tech, and so it seems harmless. But it is part of an overall procedure to integrate us so tightly (free Google docs, log in with Google/Apple/X is another of many), so that we can't function on our own any more, or choose any company we like any more.