I hesitate to say this bluntly, because I know a whole lot of folks on here are actively involved in technical development of one sort or another, and derive both pleasure and a significant part of their identity from that fact. There’s something I think we all need to get clear on, though, and it’s something I myself had to learn the hard way: no tool will liberate us. The achievement of justice cannot be automated, or otherwise outsourced to a technical apparatus of any sort.
You work on tools because that’s what you’re good at, because that’s the way your brain works, because that’s what you enjoy or can get compensated for doing. That’s all as may be. But please, please do not make the mistake of thinking that the tool – any tool, of any sort whatever – will produce “progress.” There is and can be no technical fix for the social-psychological, existential or ontological predicaments that confront us. In the end there is only us, staring back at us from whatever mirror we’ve built.
(“I don’t know who needs to hear this,” etc., and at that I strongly suspect the people who most do will struggle to take the thought on board. Selah.)
