Not technology in general, but there are specific technologies that are mind-blowing.

Back when I was in college, IBM announced they developed the technology to manipulate individual atoms. They used it to spell out “IBM” at the atomic level.

Not sure where or if they ever DID anything with it, but that was fascinating!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms)

I had one before, but it was stupid cheap, connection was frail and didn’t have good range.

I’m not sure exactly whether this was protocol improvements or some other form of implementation improvement (antenna location?) but, yeah, I’ve found that the popular Sony WH-1000MX6 headphones have much better ability to talk to my Bluetooth transceiver at range than do a number of older earbuds and headphones I have. The range is closer to, say, a cordless phone or WiFi.

Depending upon your use case, that may not matter; for a smartphone, more range probably doesn’t matter much. But if you’re talking to a desktop computer, it can be handy.

If you know the right incantatuons, you can make sand do the things you want. IM A FUCKING WIZARD, HARRY

Whether it’s hardware or software, I like technology that enables me to do things. Playing fun and impressive games, painting, animating, sculpting, making music, making my own video games, and so on…

One of the simple reasons I really dislike AI slop is that it removes humanity from the process. In fact, there isn’t much of a process at all. It’s all about plopping out an end product and there’s no “art” to it. As someone who values my own creativity, loves the process of making things, and doesn’t believe in exploiting others for my own gain, generative AI is the last thing I want out of technology.

Of course, a lot of technology is “fascinating”:

The complex and intricate boards with even more complex and intricate chips and parts on them.

Storing data with electrons in RAM cells or on magnetic, optical and audio media.

How chips are basically printed on to wafers.

How we turn high level ideas into source code, compile it down to machine code, which is then interpreted as a series of numerical CPU instructions.

And even though I hate how AI is being used and humans are being abused, how “machine learning” works by essentially biasing a data structute a certain way is also fascinating.

How fast and small all of this has become over the last 100 years.

How we power all of this stuff by harnessing river currents and the sun, and by splitting the atom, is also fascinating.

There’s a lot about technology to enjoy and find interesting. We just have to remember that it should be there to make life better, not worse.

Extremely basic example, but sometimes I’ll open a web page and feel amazed at the huge stack of technology that came together to make it happen. On both ends: CPU, RAM, motherboard, networking components. In between fiber, switches, and routers. And once the data arrives, a browser interpreting HTML, CSS, and JS, all to show me dickbutt.

Can you share the dongle you got? I tried a couple of bt dongles and they SUCKED.

I can, at the touch of a button, heat the entire home. Most of human history that’s mind boggling. You had to work a lot to heat and cool an area.

I can communicate with anyone, anywhere, even in space is basically real time. Hot damn? Something that could have taken ages until recently!

Sufficiently advanced technology…

I work for a turbine engine manufacturer. I don’t do the cool stuff as I’m just an old IT guy, but I get to talk to those that do once in a while.

Think about this the next time you go blasting through the air at 500mph (804kmh) and 34,000ft (10300m) in the air in a metal tube…

The blades of the first stage turbine operate at the temperature they were cast at. In other words they operate at their melting point. If you’re not familiar with turbine engines, well… It’s there in the name. The turbine essentially is the prime moving part in the engine that actually produces the power to run the rest of it. If it goes, so does the engine and quite possibly in an extremely exciting way.

How does this work? Magic… Or good engineering. I’ve been told how it works, but I honestly do not understand it well enough to write about it.

For me that is the very definition of fascinating.

I can video call a relative in China and its real time exchange of information.

Someone like, say, Wong Kim Ark, for example had to send a letter that went by boat that took months.

(I highly doubt that there was even a telegraph line across the pacific, right?)

I can have a personal witness with me in case of conflict (phone video recording)

Large scale science experiments are usually pretty fascinating regarding the technology & engineering involved. The LHC and other particle colliders, LIGO and large interferometers, James Webb space telescope & other large off planet observatory platforms.

We can already hold all of human knowledge in your hands.

Looking forwards to injecting Wikipedia into a Covid variant.

Technology, especially that which you didn’t fully understand, is basically magic and magic is very interesting 🪄

Honestly it’s probably just how easily accessible things that are normally hard to reach for humans becomes.

If I want the upcoming weather, I can access a distributed network of government satellites, local weather monitoring stations, and independently operated weather monitoring relays, all combined together into an alert saying “It’s gonna rain in 15 minutes” 3 seconds after I open the app.

If I want to talk to an expert on a subject, the author of my favorite books, a politician, or simply my friends, I can just send them an email or often a DM.

If I want to know about practically anything, there’s either gonna be a site out there with someone tirelessly writing a 20 paragraph article about it, or a Wikipedia page contributed to by thousands of volunteers to make sure people like me could quickly find the information.

And if I want to share information I know about with other people, I can also go to Wikipedia, not as a viewer, but as an editor, and keep other people informed the moment they go to Wikipedia trying to answer a question of their own, or just feed their general curiosity.

This type of thing is way slower through books, live broadcast stations on TV, (though I suppose that still counts as “technology”, just more legacy), having to meet up with your friends in person before you can talk to them, having to travel to a research institution and schedule a meeting just to talk to an expert, etc.

It just feels magical to have a question, look it up, and just get an answer. Just like that.

Generally i think technology is fascinating because tool use is deeply ingrained in our dna. Our ancestors who used tools more ended up surviving and reproducing more, so having a fascination with technology is literally an instinct built into our species

I’ve always been fascinated by the act of pushing a button to make something happen. Like since before I remember. Lift / Elevator buttons especially at first*. Light switches, even.

Then combine that with relatively high-functioning ASD or AuDHD or whatever’s actually going on between my ears, creating an affinity for things are logical and lack messy, confusing emotions.

*There’s one lift that’s been in service longer than I’ve been alive, was frequently used by my mother when I was in a pushchair / stroller to bypass the nearby staircase. I still yearn to go back to it, press the buttons for myself, see the way they light up and ride the lift. The last time I was nearby it was busy and in use by mothers using pushchairs / strollers, believe it or not. The nerve!