Mr. Ton-That and Mr. Scalzo give a master class in what the writer Rose Eveleth calls “the myth of inevitable technological progress.” Technologists decide to compare the creep of new tools to evolution — a natural process. Of course, this isn’t true. Tech doesn’t evolve naturally; it’s the result of calculated decisions by people motivated by any number of factors: ambition, greed, curiosity or even boredom.
Thank you so much for the link to the Vox article on technological “evolution.” It’s particularly apt for me since I’m almost finished rereading a book published some 30 years ago: New World New Mind, Moving Toward Conscious Evolution. It’s seriously out of date, but interesting, at least, for the way in which its illustrations of “old mind” exactly parallel our situation today. It also touts education for “new minds” as a form of evolution, using optimistic examples from that time, all of which, as far as I know, have gone down to dust, just as most forward-thinking projects inevitably do.