Silicon Valley Tech companies have taken advantage of clever marketing, favorable public opinion, and shiny-magic gadgets to ensnare us with tech designed to be addictive, invasively surveilliant, and exploitative.
It is acceptable to question the reality that these techno-oligarchs and digital capitalists claim to be making and see that they aren’t actually making our world better. They only make themselves richer, which is evident from the homes they buy, the cars they drive, and even the clothes they wear. They are prospering at the expense of all their users.
Here’s just some of the examples of their past promises and what they’ve done instead.
The web was to bring glorious access to content that was free, current, and reliable. Instead, we have a internet garbage dump and sewer of nonsense. Search and you don’t know what excrement you will get next, and the stench only increases.
Next, social media was supposed to bring us closer together and connect the globe. Instead, we have never been more polarized and divided. Facebook and Twitter have proven to be misinformation machines and BS spreaders. Even Linked-In is a BS-marketing platform where if you can package it and sell it to get clicks, you become an “influencer.” Tik-Tok, YouTube, all are platforms that allow you spread excrement and get paid for it.
Then there was cell phones which were supposed to provide us constant access to all of this—the web, social media, etc. We could always be connected. Instead, it offers always-on-demand addiction and isolation. It even makes us less social…just watch a family sitting in a restaurant, all engaged with screens instead of each other. There’s connection, but it is to what these tech companies want us connected to so they can sell ads and make money from our addictions and data.
Now it is AI. It is here and it has its promises of taking away all the dirty, distasteful work we don’t like doing. It is going to solve all our problems. It promises to make us even more “efficent and free.” What will its “instead” be? Even today there are hints.
Instead of fulfilling its promises, AI will bring us a more polluted world because of its increased demands for power needed for their server farms. Coal plants that were going to be decommissioned are being kept online, furthering polluting the environment. There is even talk of restarting the use of a nuclear plant on the East Coast that almost made a big swath of Pennsylvania into the American version of Chernobyl.
In addition, instead of fulfilling its promises, AI is causing tech companies to consume even more scarce fresh water resources to cool their massive server farms in many areas of the country at a time it is becoming harder and harder to provide safe drinking water to populations.
Finally, instead of fulfiling its promises, AI is adding more garbage and sewage to the Internet garbage dump with its growing pile of AI slop. The web will become more and more a place of misinformation and nonsense. One can only imagine what the web will be in 15 or 20 years!
As these AI companies and those that keep peddling their products as a replacement for human workers, we seem to be getting closer to the utopia of machines that Kurt Vonnegut describes in his novel Player Piano where people who have no purpose in life live in cities with no future and no hope.
Here’s the lesson: NOTHING BIG TECH INVENTS WAS AND IS INEVITABLE. Our purpose in life is not to use their products or adapt our lives to use their products. We can, with leadership and vision, demand they create products that serve our ends and not just theirs.
Educators who are scrambling to “adapt to AI” because they’ve been sold on its inevitability are misguided. There is no evidence that it has to be inevitable in its current form or any form. Choices can be made, and we do not have to surrender to make these products successful.
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