Techno-utopianism is the naive belief that technological innovation is going to create a paradise on earth for all of humanity. In the age of AI this notion has been enjoying a bit of a resurgence.
Techno-utopianism is an infantile worldview to hold in the year 2026, because it is assumes we live in some kind of children’s cartoon show with wild-haired inventors in laboratories lined with beakers and microscopes who create helpful new machines which are then either purchased by consumers on the free market or implemented by the government to make the country a nicer place to live in.
In reality, we live under a globe-spanning empire run by plutocrats and secretive government agencies who manipulate our entire society to ensure that all outcomes expand their wealth and power. They’re not interested in making the world a better place. The most powerful among them are not even simply interested in money. They are interested in dominating the planet and maintaining the political status quo which allows them to rule.
The plot hole in techno-utopianism is that technologies don’t emerge in a vacuum: they are always controlled by somebody, and those somebodies always wind up being the people who control everything else. They’ve been doing it with the internet, they’re doing it with AI, and they’ll keep doing it with anything else that comes up for as long as they hold power.
If anything like free energy ever emerged, the empire managers would immediately restrict access to it and then start working on turning it into a weapon.
If we ever developed neurological implants which allowed our brains to interface wordlessly with machines, the CIA and the NSA would with absolute certainty have a backdoor into every single one operating inside the western empire.
Anything that could end poverty and lack would be suppressed, because capitalism doesn’t work without scarcity and have-nots. Artificial superintelligence would be used solely to preserve and bolster the imperial status quo. Nanobots and anti-gravity would be immediately weaponized by the Pentagon. Dramatic lifespan extension would be priced to accessibility only by billionaires and trillionaires.
And that’s assuming our capitalist system is still capable of producing major improvements to human life anymore, which doesn’t really seem to be the case. These days most “innovation” takes the form of coming up with an app designed to extract labor from the working class in some new form of exploitation, or these new AI technologies that we all know are going to end up being used for domestic surveillance and horrifying weapons of mass military slaughter. Apart from that, innovation has largely stagnated, because it turns out that only permitting inventions which both (A) generate profit and (B) do not threaten existing power structures is an incredibly constricting limitation to hamstring ourselves with.
So we’re not going to innovate our way out of this mess. The technological deus ex machina solution to all our problems is not going to arrive at our doorstep while we sit on our couches scrolling Instagram. If we are to survive the existential hurdles our species is approaching and begin building a healthy world, we’re going to have to actually change how we are and how we live.
That’s what I find so off-putting about techno-utopianism: it’s a faith-based belief system which discourages humanity from changing. We don’t need to push toward revolution; the robots are coming to save us. We don’t need to change our collective behavior and stop destroying our ecosystem; the superintelligent AI gods will change the world around us. We don’t need to adapt as a species beyond this awkward evolutionary transition phase and shatter the bonds of the ego; all we need to do is passively wait around for High Tech Jesus to come and rapture us all to paradise.
It ain’t gonna happen, kids. The metallic messiah’s not coming. If we survive as a species, it will be because we grew up and made the necessary changes to our hearts and our minds to transcend our self-destructive patterning.
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Feature image via Adobe Stock.
