Technological Messianism: The ultimate trap of efficiencism
Technological Messianism is a religious expression of the extreme development of efficiency
When programmers started writing takeout apps using the phrase "changing the world", the savior complex became a cheap hallucinogen for the technology industry
As Pope Francis railed against technological Messianism in his encyclical, VCs in Silicon Valley were writing checks for the seventh "AI Medical Savior" project. This is no coincidence-** The technological savior narrative and efficiencyism essentially share the same set of DNA: replacing moral judgment with quantifiable data, compressing human complexity into optimization problems **. When technology giants used "subversion,""revolution," and "redefinition" as opening remarks for product launches, we should have realized that efficiencism has evolved into a new religion under the catalysis of capital.
More "AI diagnostic artifacts" die every year in the field of medical technology than it claims to save. The most ironic thing about the Theranos scam is that when Elizabeth Holmes used the grand narrative of "a drop of blood changes the fate of human health" to make money, ** all the real world needed was cheaper insulin and closer community clinics **. In global digital health financing in 2023, the average valuation of the "AI+ Early Cancer Screening" project is US$120 million, but the JAMA paper reveals that its median clinical sensitivity is only 64%-not as good as the result of passing a glance by experienced radiologists when watching the film.
The core trick of technological Messianism is to package untested assumptions into inevitable laws:
- ** Computing power growth = social progress **(ignore the chaos of human decision-making)
- ** Data accumulation = problem solving **(concealing the ethical costs of data collection)
- ** Model iteration = civilization evolution **(simplifying humans into objects for parameter optimization)
Efficiencism Strain Mutation
The CTO of a fresh food e-commerce company showed off to me last year about their "smart scheduling system": the algorithm pushed the delivery staff's time utilization rate to 96%, and reduced the cost per order by 23%. Three months later, his rider died suddenly in the garage after working continuously for 14 hours. At the post-event review meeting, the product manager frowned and complained: "The model did not calculate that the human heart would have a tolerance threshold."
** The most fatal illusion of the cult of efficiency is that it always assumes that there is a global optimal solution in the system **. But when you abstract the delivery staff into a "mobile node", compress the emergency room into a "resource pool", and simplify education into a "knowledge transfer rate", real-world fault lines are smoothed out mathematically:
- algorithm does not know that the delivery clerk's child is running a fever
The - scheduling model does not consider the doctor's hand shake after just three surgeries - Education SaaS ignores poor students 'stuck on using second-hand mobile phones to surf the Internet
The essence of "technology replacing God" criticized by the Pope is the colonization of complexity by efficiency-using computable indicators to expel unquantifiable values. When Silicon Valley says,"We're solving X," it often translates to,"We're redefining X as a problem that can pass AB testing."
Why smart people buy indulgences collectively
The logic of selling indulgences in the medieval church has changed in today's technology circle:
| ** indulgence 1.0** | ** Digital indulgences 2.0** |
|---|---|
| "The moment the gold coin is dropped into the box, your father's soul rises to heaven." | "Subscribe to our carbon-neutral SaaS and automatically eliminate the carbon footprint with every transaction" |
| Publisher: Church | Issuer: Carbon Credit Platform |
| Pricing Logic: Fear Tax | Pricing logic: middle-class guilt tax |
The core product of a carbon offset platform valued at US$3 billion is to cut the Amazon rainforest into virtual plots for sale. What the buyer couldn't see was that the same forest had been mortgaged repeatedly to five NGOs, while local indigenous people were being shot for preventing logging companies from entering "protected" woodland. ** The technological messiah born by efficiencism is essentially a money-gathering machine wearing the holy robe of code.
Faced with the accusation of "Are you opposed to technological innovation"(classic steelman is here):
- ** The real problem is not that it opposes technology, but that it is that it opposes the technology narrative. **-When the Health Band Company used the PPT to raise funds that "extends human life by 10 years", children in African slums died of diarrhea due to lack of $5 water purification tablets;
- ** Efficiency optimization is never neutral **: Uber's algorithm to reduce taxi fares by 30% while pushing drivers 'hourly wages below the minimum wage;
- ** The biggest lie of the technological savior is to disguise systemic social problems as bugs that can be fixed by tools **.
traps written in genes
The slogan "Use technology to make the world a better world" is still hung on the wall of the conference room of a large Internet factory. In an underground warehouse in the same building, a 35-year-old optimized programmer was looking for blood pressure drugs in a pile of cartons. ** The cruelest price of technological Messianism is not that it fails to fulfill its promises, but that it makes us accustomed to using grand narratives to paralyze specific sufferings.
The ultimate paradox of efficiency is that when humans try to eliminate all inefficiencies with tools, they become the most efficient self-exploiting machines. The sentence in the Pope's encyclical,"Technology cannot replace mankind's pursuit of meaning", which may translate into words that engineers can understand:
** Don't forget the broken coordinates on the X axis when you endlessly pursue higher and faster on the Y axis **
We are not building the Tower of Babel, we are pasting gold foil on cement piers.