Plague of techno-optimism will destroy us all

99th Day: A Warning About Technology

“Techno-optimism is a plague on our society, rife with unintended consequences,” Erica Gies, author of Water Always Wins, wrote to me after reading my new book, 99th Day: A Warning About Technology. “Its single-focus problem-solving in a complex, intertwined world causes or amplifies many of the problems we face today: climate change, water scarcity and flooding, food insecurity, extreme forest fires.”

As the horror of the tech bro, world surveillance capitalism, planned obsolescence dystopia unfolds before us, what will it take for our societies to seriously question all this technology? The environmental depravity of AI should be enough to condemn it. Quite the opposite. Many scientists and technologists are falling over themselves to say that if we only invest more in AI, it will, in fact, save the world. This dodgy, badly designed technology, whose greatest strengths are in propaganda, cheap entertainment, lies and slop, reflects deep trends and patterns in the technology industry. Most tech is—and has for a long time been—quite average and massively bloated with poor-quality, rambling code. The typical computer programmer today will never