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In collaboration with Elizabeth Lepro.
This is the first essay in a two-part series about technosolutionism. Stay tuned for Part II.
Recently, Mark Zuckerberg suggested Meta AI could alleviate loneliness by acting as a friend or confidant to humans.
“The average person wants more connectivity [and] connection than they have,” he said, adding that AI could be useful in helping humans navigate tricky conversations, romantically or professionally.
Addressing those who are critical of using the technology in this way, Zuckerberg said, “If you think that something someone is doing is bad, and they think it’s really valuable, most of the time, in my experience, they’re right and you’re wrong, and you just haven’t come up with a framework yet for understanding why the thing that [they’re] doing is valuable and helpful in their life.”
Zuckerberg’s “framework” for determining what’s valuable is technosolutionism, or techno-optimism. These terms, which are generally interchangeable, describe a belief in the idea that more technology is always the remedy to all problems, even those created or bolstered by technology.
Zuckerberg, and other technosolutionists pushing for AI to take over what have long been human tasks, may genuinely think they’re doing something beneficial by introducing technology that will help people optimize their performance and comfort socially. The irony is that Zuckerberg is engineering a temporary “solution” to a problem that his company has, generally, benefitted from, if not directly contributed to. And to defend this “solution,” he’s suggesting an over-simplified framework for understanding its value.
Social media—the realm in which Zuckerberg made his fortune as the founder of Facebook and now Meta—often contributes to feelings of isolation, loneliness, and depression. A 2018 University of Pennsylvania study found that college students who limited their social media use to 10 minutes per day showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to a control group. Another comprehensive 2022 study reviewed adolescents’ use of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found that, although one-to-one connection and online friendships were somewhat beneficial to young people during lockdown, “in general, higher social media use and media addiction were related to higher ill-being.”
There’s plenty of research on the correlation between social media and loneliness—less so when it comes to AI. Still, a psychology professor at the University of Stirling who studies loneliness and connection told the New York Times he finds it unlikely that chatbots are a long-term solution to human isolation. “A realistic A.I. chatbot could give a temporary reprieve of the feelings of loneliness,” he said, but “it’s a stretch to say it will reduce or get rid of loneliness.”
Zuckerberg is being, at best, short-sighted, and at worst willfully ignorant. Technosolutionism is self-validating—it works for tech companies and their leadership because, using this framework, no product that they put into the world can be harmful so long as people report finding it useful in their individual lives. And any harmful byproduct of their tech that they are willing to acknowledge, they can also alleviate by creating and layering on more tech products—each, conveniently, profit-generating. For people on the profiting end of the tech industry, there’s only ever upside.
But for the collective, there are myriad downsides: the massive environmental impact of AI, increased anxiety and addictive habits, and further dependence on Big Tech corporations actively hoarding and selling our personal data, to name just a few.
Technosolutionism is a narrow perspective on progress and innovation, deeply rooted in the logic of capitalism: an innovation is pursued if it is the path of least resistance toward the largest financial return.
I’m using Zuckerberg as a specific example, but technosolutionism is less an individual worldview and more of a culture to which most of us belong and often celebrate. Belief in the virtue of this culture relies on two essential premises:
An economy comprised of ‘valuable’ short-term solutions developed independently from one another will collectively improve society in the long-term. A solution is proven to be ‘valuable’ if it has widespread adoption.
The more money that can be made creating a solution, the more motivated the average person will be to work toward its creation. And that more money = more motivation is an inherent human truth, rather than a conditioned, cultural reality.
Let’s put this same technosolutionist logic to use in another context: A 1788 survey of 143 water-powered cotton mills in England and Scotland revealed that two-thirds of the mill workers were children. These children were regularly incurring physical injuries and chronic illnesses as a result of their work.
Now let’s imagine that someone enterprising invented a special hand fluid that the child workers could dip their hands in when they got cut or bruised, which temporarily numbed their pain so that they could get back to work quickly and continue earning. I’m sure children would report that the fluid was ‘valuable.’ Now imagine the inventor of the magic hand-numbing fluid actually also owns one (or most) of the factories where the kids work—the circle of technosolutionist logic is complete.
To return to a metaphor I’ve used a few times: Technosolutionism means we’re often manufacturing band-aids out of the blood of our wounds, rather than confronting what’s wounding us.
Child labor was eventually banned in England and Scotland through legislation and regulation. Until that happened, would it have been fair to say that surface-level fixes like the hand-numbing fluid were still helpful? I’d imagine it depends on the case. It is, of course, better that children are in less pain. But pain is also an indicator that something is wrong, not just in our bodies, but within our systems. Temporarily numbing the pain while actively avoiding its root cause means we’re accepting a deeply harmful baseline reality as inevitable and unchangeable.
If we were to expand our perspective to consider the web of cultural, political, and economic systems that contribute to problems like chronically injured children and mass loneliness, it would add a sizable amount of complexity and effort to the innovation exercise. But it would also more thoroughly address the problem at hand. Deeper solutions to societal problems often require broad collaboration, making them difficult for a single company to ‘own.’ Instead, technosolutionists narrow in on a point of friction within the current infrastructure of systems and then suggest that they can alleviate that singular problem—and only that singular problem.
I’m not completely opposed to all technologies that come from technosolutionist innovation, I just don’t buy into the idea that they further social progress in the way that many argue. Technosolutionism and social progress are, at best, independent forces, and at worst, directly at odds.
In this essay and the one that will follow, my goal is to break apart the technosolutionist premises above, attacking its foundation. In doing so, I’m arguing that (1) there is a more effective way than isolated tech innovations to create genuinely better collective conditions for society and (2) that people can be incentivized to pursue these innovations even if there’s a limit to the financial upside.
Zuckerberg is right about one thing: Some people probably will report that they find Meta AI valuable for finding connection. Therefore, to Zuckerberg, Meta AI is valuable.
It’s not crazy to believe that how we behave is a direct, and logical, consequence of what we value, and to think that this relationship works in one direction—that we each have a relatively fixed set of values that guide our actions and decisions accordingly.
This is an over-simplification. Social science research suggests that the relationship between behaviors and values is reciprocal and dynamic. In other words, how we act may also influence what we value. We’re not just using products because we have a fundamental need; the products, technologies, and services we use and the behaviors those products require of us also actively shape and change how we think about our needs.
Repeated practices, like brushing your teeth or driving a car, can reinforce or even create values—the more regularly you drive a car, the more you may care about personal transportation and everything that comes along with it. By contrast, if you don’t have to drive a car to work or social activities, but instead have access to reliable, affordable public transportation, you may not place as high a value on personal car ownership. And you may not, for example, link such broad values as ‘freedom’ with car ownership, in the way many Americans do.
When we are given an apparent solution to a systemic problem, that solution also shapes the way we think about our values. If you are able to buy a gun and keep it in your house, you may do so and feel safer. You may start to say you value gun ownership when what you originally valued was safety.
These values, some deep and long-standing, others more recently conditioned, are not purely abstract and conceptual. Though they may dictate personal choices, they often come with tangible, material consequences for all of society. If you’ve learned to value the convenience of dumping your garbage into the river that supplies your local drinking water, the poisoned water will still kill you and others. Technosolutionist products and innovations—often guided by nothing more than convenience—are in many cases conditioning people’s values and actions in directions that will ultimately collide with our fundamental survival-level needs.
Technosolutionism and social progress are, at best, independent forces, and at worst, directly at odds.
Zuckerberg claims that he’s innovating in line with a genuine need, but a Meta AI friend is only valuable in a world where genuine human connection is harder to come by—and it works in Zuckerberg’s best interest that things stay that way.
Later in the same interview, Zuckerberg talks about how he tries to maintain a “productive relationship” with whichever administration is in power. Technosolutionists routinely cozy up to regulators to advocate for the continuation of systems-level conditions. Not only do they pursue profitable, temporary innovations, they often interfere with policy, avoiding supporting related systems-level solutions and even actively obstructing them.
Intuit, the company that owns the tax filing software TurboTax, spent 20 years lobbying against a governmental effort that would make tax filing easy and free for most Americans. “From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington,” writes ProPublica. Again, this isn’t an abnormality. It works in technosolutionists’ favor that conditions remain relatively stable in order for their solutions to keep working as the balm for any related symptoms.
Because a singular technology can present itself as the silver bullet to a massive, existential issue, it can actually cloud our ability to see how these stable, yet unsustainable, system-level conditions are not actually being significantly impacted. For example, the electric car, one of the most widely praised “game-changing” tech innovations of the last several decades, promises to address the harmful carbon emissions that drive climate change. This innovation does lower emissions, but that’s just a single point of friction within a broader systems-level crisis. By continuing to encourage our infrastructural dependence on cars, e-vehicles still grease the wheels of an increasingly resource- and carbon-intensive way of living.
If we dig a little deeper than the misleading marketing campaigns, we find that the supply chain for e-vehicles is riddled with worsening social and environmental impacts—child labor, for instance, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Cobalt is mined. A deeper solution that could work alongside and eventually in place of e-vehicles would be to push for more pedestrian-friendly urban design and improved public transit infrastructure. But that isn’t a technosolutionist’s fix; it isn’t a solution that can be privately owned, and won’t be obviously profitable.
The only systems changes technosolutionists will push for are those that remove the red tape that blocks their ability to innovate and those that create policy in favor of their personal financial success.
Technosolutionists spend a lot of time, money, and energy cultivating cultural, legislative, and social conditions that allow their products and fortunes to flourish. And they often wrap their lobbying efforts in socially conscious- sounding language. Take Sam Altman writing in 2021 about his ‘Capitalism for Everyone’ proposal, which would encourage unfettered economic growth: “The new social contract will be a [wealth] floor for everyone in exchange for a ceiling for no one, and a shared belief that technology can and must deliver a virtuous circle of societal wealth.” He even directly points out the relationship between private economic incentive and political success, saying that “policymakers who embrace [his proposal] early will be rewarded: they will themselves become enormously popular.”
Sometimes, technosolutionists don’t even have to work very hard to obstruct progressive change—their customers, accustomed to readily available temporary solutions, will resist anything that threatens access to a product they’ve come to rely on.
For example, once the gun-value solidifies, it’s harder to get people on board for a systems-level solution to violence if that solution also reduces gun access, even though it’s a proposal in favor of the core safety-value. Once we go down the path of relying on AI innovations to alleviate our loneliness, we may find it more difficult to get to the heart of why we’ve become so isolated from one another to begin with.
For many of today’s problems, surface-level fixes don’t simply reduce the friction created by harmful systems, they also further entrench us in these systems, shaping our values accordingly.
This is what I mean when I say we’re not only all part of this technosolutionist culture, but we also celebrate it: We are all so deeply entrenched in our current systems—hyper-consumerism, hyper-growth, tech progressivism, etc.—that they’ve become the invisible baseline against which we live our lives.
When we laud new technologies and the moguls who bring them to market, it’s worth asking ourselves: Are these solutions truly enabling a better quality of life for all, or am I just caught in the technosolutionist trap? Is Amazon actually making my life more fulfilling through one-day delivery, or is it reducing the friction on a system of endless consumption and production that leaves me in a constant state of feeling overworked and financially scarce? Is one-day delivery only valuable because of the invisible baseline from which I now live my life? Can we imagine and action a better baseline?
That last question is important, and I don’t mean for it to be rhetorical. Acknowledging that technosolutionism isn’t the most effective method for achieving progressive change is only useful if we can come up with another viable approach to innovation that is more effective.
In part two of this series I will present that alternative approach and describe its feasibility. Speaking as an entrepreneur who has worked in tech, I’m confident that an alternative to technosolutionism doesn’t mean that innovators/entrepreneurs must be martyrs. We can create an attractive path for entrepreneurs, and for society, if we expand our understanding of upside beyond the more money = more motivation paradigm that oversimplifies human wants and needs.
Thanks to Esther Sanchez-Gomez, who contributed editing to this essay.
