Sisyphus
The recent resignation of Thierry Breton sparked some celebrations among the European tech community. Breton had been at the forefront of the EU’s effort to regulate the technology sector. While his resignation was for “personal reasons”, it comes less than a week after a report on the future of European competitiveness was published.
One of the key takeaways from this report was that Europe had been doing everything in its power to stifle the tech sector. They found that over-regulation by the government was killing small companies. If you’re like me, this seems obvious, yet so many people are wary of technology.
Why? It’s because we are being lied to.
It is a lie that technology replaces our jobs. This tired trope has been echoed again and again by politicians who claim to want to ‘protect’ you. Covid showed us that politicians wanting to ‘protect’ you should send a shiver down your spine.
If our politicians were around at the advent of the wheel, they’d wish to regulate it so as not to replace the job of the porter who carried everything on their back.
Technology makes us more productive. It can eliminate jobs in the short term, but long term it serves as a complement to human labour.
It's a simple function in economics that the more productive you are, the higher the wage you can fetch. It is ignorant to think that technology replaces: technology complements. It is a lie that humans and technology ruin the environment.
We are forever told about the worsening storms, the changing climate and the danger that technology causes. This leads a place like Europe to shut down their nuclear plants and to increase the cost of power and fuel to de-incentivise use. It is a systematic attempt at putting people back in the stone age.
So what is the truth?
The truth is that civilisation was built on technology. Everything from the wheel, mentioned earlier, to the roof over my head is a function of improving technology.
For the last few hundred years we have been glorifying the improvements of technology. From the aeroplane to the Apollo program: innovation has a place in our society.
Only recently have we been told to be fearful of it.
Doomsayers look to the most clean, efficient and effective ways to generate energy – nuclear – and claim it’s too dangerous, just as they say AI will replace us. It is all in service of stopping growth and robbing us of our birthright to improve.
The claim that climate change will make us go extinct is an attempt to make us forget the power that humans have. We master our environment better than any other animal.
This extreme pessimism towards technology that Breton embodied ignores the thousands of years of technological progress humans have enjoyed. A lesson in all this for New Zealand is not to go down the path of the EU. We should be optimistic about technology. It makes us better, more productive and richer.
We must embrace it and capitalise on the coming advances as best we can, because if we are not growing, we are dying.
