Living with or Through Technology?

When assessing the impact of technology in a panoramic fashion, the progressivist and nostalgic narratives clearly manifest themselves. On the progressivist side, artificial intelligence (AI) is seen as solving humanity’s problems, potentially even ushering in a post-work society in which wealth and comfort can be taken for granted. As a precondition, AI is understood as outperforming humans, making it suboptimal to hold on to human-focused employment and causing a reinvention of the economy itself or supplementing humans with technology. On the nostalgic side, meanwhile, emphasis is on surveillance and data-driven control as leading to the loss of human agency and autonomy. Such datafication processes are seen as merely entrenching existing patterns of power and discrimination and leading to subjection of humans for the profit of technology companies.