The Adult Technocrat

The danger is not technology itself, but the quiet, unquestioned surrender to its conveniences.

A few months ago, ChatGPT unveiled a new health feature that allows users to upload medical test reports for analysis, carefully stopping just short of formal clinical advice. On paper, it was a modest extension of an already ubiquitous tool. In practice, it signalled something larger: the quiet expansion of machines into domains once considered deeply human. Around the same time, a television news host, in a parting broadcast, captured the zeitgeist with unnerving clarity. People, she observed, were using ChatGPT for everything – from therapy, dating advice, life decisions, even questions of self-worth. The system now handles billions of prompts daily. Her stark warning was that just because one can ask a question does not mean one should; if it is not something one would shout in a crowded room, it ought not to be typed into a chatbot. Such anxieties are not new. More than a century ago, Henry David Thoreau offered a line that continues to haunt the technological age: “Our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Being a technologist, I cannot entirely agree with Thoreau’s text, of which that sentence is only a tiny fragment. Yet, having browsed through the rugged history of technology, I, for sure, find myself partially aligned.

The fact is most technological innovations have genuine necessities in their respective contexts. An intellect like Thoreau would never be foolish to question the benefits of AI for a data scientist, computers for a mathematician, microscopes for a microbiologist, or the internet for a social scientist. He was rather speaking about the thoughtless democratization of technological fruits, not the rigor behind those innovations. The bigger question is how does technology interact with culture and society as a whole?

Consider a small society in north-central Tanzania: the Ihanzu. For generations, they observed a peculiar ritual. After each sexual encounter, individuals were required to light a new fire. The act was not merely symbolic; it served as a form of social accounting, effectively curbing adultery by making relationships visible through the labour of fetching fire-lighting sticks. Then came European traders bearing matchsticks. What appeared to be a trivial convenience - a quicker way to make fire - quietly dismantled a centuries-old social structure. By eliminating the need to fetch tools, it erased the ritual’s public dimension. A technology introduced without regard for its cultural function undid a system that had regulated behaviour for generations.

My father never wore a wristwatch. We ragged him endlessly, but he never folded. He would calmly reply: If you want to do things on time, you don’t need a watch. I later realized the socio-political side to that refusal.

Benedictine monks of the 11th-12th-century used to strike bells at specific hours to ensure regularity of their seven daily prayers. By the 14th century, this idea of a mechanical clock would migrate to the marketplace. The merchant class would realize its profit potential by making servants work according to the clock. By the Industrial Age, wristwatches were marketed as status symbols. Like the Ihanzu people we would turn a tool ‘designed-to-force’ onto trend by mere surrender. Thus, without ever questioning the necessity of a device introduced primarily to extract labour for masters’ profit, we unknowingly transformed it into a mass-trend. Even the socialists once acknowledged that without wristwatches, capitalism’s expansion would have been far less seamless. That is precisely why wristwatches were once rejected outright by that section of my father’s generation.

In the same vein, the later successes of cars, weapons, social media, AI could be traced to this idea of unquestioned surrender to tech-harvests; and later to how a tech-trend leads to cultural-change, power-gaps and social control. It’s not the tech itself; our or the consumers’ unquestioned allegiance to those harvests is the issue, and the tech-elites know it. The most curious part is history repeated itself every time a new technological product took the market by storm. And yet the sociologists hope “surely this must be the last!” No. By giving people filled matchboxes in a dynamite factory while calling it ‘technological empowerment’ cannot prevent explosions or death.

Few thinkers examined this relationship between technology and culture as rigorously as Neil Postman. His work revolved around a deceptively simple premise: that every technology carries within it a philosophy, shaping not just what people do but how they think. Postman argued that societies rarely ask the right questions before embracing new tools. Among those he proposed were inquiries into the specific problem a technology claims to solve, whose problem it actually addresses, and what new problems it might create. He urged scrutiny of which institutions might be weakened, how language itself might change, and what new forms of social, financial and political power might emerge.

Such questions are seldom posed in the heat of technological enthusiasm. Instead, adoption precedes understanding. Convenience becomes the primary metric, eclipsing considerations of long-term consequence. In the process, something subtler is lost.

Postman added an incisive observation: those who drive technological innovations tend to read, write, and speak exceptionally well. Whereas those who succumb to the fruits, however, gradually drift away from all three of these fundamental skills. In other words, we are of no innocence in creating that void between the tech-elites (the ‘Broligarchs’) and us (the people) - we actively contribute to it.

In a nutshell, ultimately, the responsibility of survival has returned to us. We are being called to act, to leave our complaining convenient cocoon and grow up technologically to be what I call as ‘The Adult Technocrat.’ But the question is can we?

(The writer is a Lead Process Engineer with GE HealthCare in France and a columnist with four books to his credit. Views personal.)