Before you get your hopes up, this isn’t an essay criticizing the water consumption of data-centers, rising memory prices or capitalism itself. I leave those debates to others. This, dear reader, is an examination of what we, the ’technology collective’, have created in our lifetimes.

To spoil it for you, I’m going to argue that, in an effort to forward our beloved electronic technology, we’re making the world a worse place. This also, isn’t an anti-technology rant. The first problem we as enthusiasts and professionals suffer, is the endlessly exploitable quality that we find technology ‘cool’. For most of us, we would gladly advance and improve it whether or not we were being paid for it.

The second problem is that the technologies we create, when effective, appear to the non-technical like a magic trick. They are mesmerizing in how powerfully useful they are. Then, inevitably, come the capitalists and opportunists, exploiting both the magic trick and our willingness to perform it.

Our sorcery lies in our ability to trick electrons in novel ways into doing maths for us, and progress always follows the same cycle: First, one or more of us will discover a new method of manipulating the copper and silicon. Some new optimization, a math trick, a new way of using it entirely. Next, the rest of us will iterate on this novelty rapidly and relentlessly, with varying ideas on how to make this new discovery practical; useful. The early stages of a new magic trick sprout, people start to take notice and awe. Finally, the levers of capital choreograph all of the above into the greatest degree of profit.

This has been an extremely effective relationship in generating both use and capital. It has brought us access to an ocean of knowledge at our fingertips, automations and inter-connectedness at a global scale. But, progress is sparse, and the audience have seen our show and demand an encore.

The magic trick is so potent, so profitable, that it’s not a brave leap to put everything else on hold and focus the world’s spotlight onto us. Not only does it wait eagerly and impatiently for our next discoveries, its artists envision it - utopias and dystopias, all based on our creations. That, my friends, is a lot of pressure. And ultimately, we can’t deliver, because we never bothered to tell them it’s just a magic trick.

Computers barely work. We know this, because we’ve built a tower of band-aids to keep the ball rolling, and every now and then a major outage, or a discovered vulnerability, or a hundred other things, are a sharp and painful reminder of the fragility of what we’ve made. But then, the lights return, we forget, and the show goes on.

We can’t deliver, but our financiers, fat with cash, have already convinced the world that we are an inevitable future. They point to the fruits of the once fun puzzles we solved, everyone believes it, and eventually we start to believe it too - we can solve every problem.

We shove electronics and software where they don’t belong, we build AI-powered toilet seats (literally), everything is an app, and your car no longer has any physical buttons. You order food through an app, and if for some absurd reason you choose to physically go to the restaurant, you’ll scan a QR code, order, pay and tip all through a web page. No human interaction is required.

Our world is certainly more efficient, yet less pleasant to participate in. However, because we can solve every problem, we create new technology to remove existing technology. We write software to block ads and tracking, to remove distracting YouTube shorts, etc.,

Utopia or dystopia, the powers that be have decided to forcibly mold the world into the tech future they’ve envisioned for us, regardless of whether we want it or not. The public has gladly swallowed the narrative for years, that this is the herald of our new digital age, our ‘singularity’. When it was ’the metaverse’, despite the majority unable to articulate what it even was, users went along. When it was ‘crypto’ and ‘blockchain technology’, they sometimes even applauded because they could briefly participate.

Mankind is desperate for a new frontier where there isn’t one. We must, at any cost, increase the size of the proverbial pie of capital. Just one more slice, to untangle us from the messes or our financial failures. ‘Tech’, it has been decided, is our best bet, which brings us to the highlight of our show - the most impressive magic trick we’ve performed so far: ‘artificial intelligence’.

It is such an impressive trick, that we’ve bet the whole house on it, and it was such an easy sell. It started off like any other new technology, with good intentions. We wanted to aid in MRI scans for more accurate diagnoses, and to help game designers with procedural generation of terrain, to make things a little bit easier. Then, we made a chat bot, and for some reason, with a little bit of imagination others extrapolated that we had created an infant God, powered by Nvidia.

Suddenly, all of the repressed, implicit promises that tech would save us, that it could solve everything, came bubbling back, and skepticism and caution vanished. Governments, corporations and individuals alike, under our spell, rejoiced. We will replace CEO’s, ministers, support staff, doctors, lawyers and scientists. Everything will become cheaper, our financial follies of the past will be forgiven, and we’ll all be rich. We just need a bit of time.

Time passed, treasuries were emptied and data-centers erected. As it became clear to the world that, even subsidized, it wasn’t very useful to the public, the illusion began to crack. So we did the sensible thing and shoved it in their faces. After all, too much has been invested. We shifted the onus to the users and staff to figure out how to make it useful. AI assistants in every app, and corporate and government directives to use more AI.

Users now resent our creations, and shudder at the thought of another app, another product. But, the show must go on. So we, either voluntarily or forcibly, shift our efforts to where the user’s opinion doesn’t matter. We manipulate the technology to distract, to surveil and to sometimes destroy them. Meanwhile, some benefit must be found for our giant chatbot, so we use it to amaze ourselves. We use it to solve our own puzzles, to rob us of our pleasure and thought, so that we too may become audience members and applaud our own magic trick.