Silicon Valley and The Question of Technology

We live in what Neil Postman called a “technopoly” in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). Technopoly is defined by the surrender of culture, values and institutions to technology. Technology reigns sovereign in our culture. It is our savior. It will solve all our problems.

A little history is in order. This world started to come into being with The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century. The rationalism of medieval scholasticism was replaced by the empiricism of Copernicus, Galileo and ultimately Newton. Francis Bacon articulated the modern vision in Novum Organum (1620) in which our increasing knowledge of nature would lead to our mastery of it via technology.

Aristotle theorized that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo overturned through empirical observation that showed that all bodies – regardless of mass – fall at the same speed. The culmination came with Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) which codified the mechanistic view of nature that survives intact to this day.

The Enlightenment project was to ape the success of science by applying reason to social life. The result was economics and The Industrial Revolution. Economic life was revolutionized by specialization, the division of labor, capital accumulation and technology. This is best epitomized by Adam Smith’s description of the pin factory at the beginning of The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Technology went into hyperdrive and assumed sovereignty with the invention of the microchip and then the personal computer in the Silicon Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. The internet and the smartphone further cemented our culture as a technopoly. Which brings us to the present moment in which the best minds are entirely focused on technological innovation as the solution to all our problems. Hence the current obsession with AI.

The problem is that technology can’t solve our most fundamental problems. Technology is a tool that can improve the efficiency of our economic lives. It improves our productivity which is the output per unit of human labor. In other words, because of technology we can produce much more with much less human labor. I by no means want to understate its importance. Human history up until the Industrial Revolution was characterized by poverty. Capitalism combined with technology have effectively solved the economic problem.

But our current problems are not economic in nature. Rather, they are spiritual. The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough material things. The problem is that we are spiritually impoverished. Despite our unprecedented wealth, all the statistics on trust, civility, family life, friendship, marriage, health, etc… point to a decline in human well being over the last 50 years.

In other words, the technological paradigm must give way to to a broader synthesis that incorporates spiritual values. AI is not going to solve our problems. We need a new ideal that supersedes the contemporary one most brilliantly dramatized by Ayn Rand’s entrepreneurial giants like Hank Rearden in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged (1957).

We live in the age of The Last Man prophesied by the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s. Great spiritual ideals have given way to an ideal way of life characterized by material abundance and conspicuous consumption. The decline in religious belief has led to Nihilism as Nietzsche foresaw it would. Driving a Tesla it turns out isn’t a substitute for character and a life devoted to principle.

For more see my:

“Economic Utopia and Spiritual Nihilism”, August 27, 2023

“Beyond The Religion of Economic Growth, Toward The Recovery of Spiritual Values”, September 8, 2023

“Historical Development of The Culture of Nihilism”, April 4, 2024

“The Structure of Knowledge and the Limits of Physical Science”, April 7, 2024