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The Future is More Stuff
Let me tell you about my smartphone.
Not the one I have now — the one I had in 2015.
It took decent photos, browsed the web reasonably well, and let me text my friends. When it eventually died, I replaced it with a newer model that… took slightly better photos, browsed the web a bit faster, and let me text my friends.
The improvement was real but marginal. The genuine quality-of-life upgrade was minimal. It’s the same pattern, repeating with almost every technological “advancement” of the past decade.
We were promised Utopia. We got 15 different food delivery apps. And the ability to have an AI read and write our emails for us.
This isn’t a rant against technology.
Lord knows, I’ve written enough of those lately.
No, it’s a consideration of what we’ve been doing with our innovative capacity, and whether we’re allocating our collective “genius” effectively.
Because when I look around at our vaunted technological progress, I can’t help but notice that we’re drowning in slightly better stuff while the rudiments of human flourishing remain stagnant or deteriorate and decay.
There’s progress here, but it’s not science fiction.
It’s barely even science.
The Innovation Treadmill
In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, the average work week would be about 15 hours. Technological advancement would free us from toil, creating a society of abundance where creativity and the “proverbial” pursuit of happiness could be our primary occupation. How laughable that seems now. Instead, we’ve created a world where work colonizes every aspect of life, where productivity tools “empower” (spew) us to work at all hours, and where tech innovation primarily serves to create new needs rather than satisfy existing ones.
We now work longer hours than we did in the 1980s, despite massive gains in productivity and efficiency. Why?
New technology creates efficiency, which theoretically should reduce work. Instead, capitalism absorbs that efficiency into increased production and consumption, creating new jobs centered around making, marketing…
