Humanity’s long infatuation with technology has deep roots in ancient dreams of liberation from the constraints of biology and physics. From the earliest times, we’ve sought a spiritual nature to supersede our bodily animal nature—including ways to morally transform our primate tribalism. More recently, we’ve tentatively broken away from the Earth’s surface, from gravity itself, even to invade other worlds. What is the impetus behind this and where will it lead?

Early humans were no doubt painfully aware of their precarious situation amongst dangerous predators, the horror of being hunted. They were well aware of the body’s frailties and its mortality. Belief in an afterlife served to deny the finality of the body’s end. Belief in magic and spirits, whether good or evil, served to assimilate inscrutable natural forces to human intentionality. Such notions served to appropriate what we now call nature to the human cultural realm. Technology began modestly with small advantages over other creatures, often copying them: sharpened stones for claws and spear points for teeth; stitched skins for fur and woven shelters for dens. Advancing technology would turn the tables on nature, perceived as hostile, with humankind rising to the top of the food chain and never forgetting its reasons to do so.

Technology has allowed us to create a parallel world, literally as separate from nature as the city is from the wild—with an identity as different from the mere animal as a machine is from a living organism. Yet, in tune with the program to dominate nature—by copying it and displacing it with human artifacts—our science strives to imitate organisms ever more closely. Asserting our human creativity, we deliberately blur the distinction between nature and artifice. We try to re-create everything natural, to do everything nature can do but better.

Though mastering disease to some extent, we remain, with chagrin, mortal. Through science, we are aware of the planet’s chequered history of extinctions and ice ages, of its eventual doom, and of potential dangers lurking in space. Our ability to plan for the future, or at least to imagine it, therefore extends to the far future of our species and even the quest for personal immortality. An improved version of humanity is an agenda in the minds of some, although there is no political “we” to speak for humanity at large or its destiny. Only recently, through genetics, is there even a consensus for how to define humanness. And this too is blurred by the intention to re-create our own nature artificially. What we shall become is up for grabs. Science fiction has mapped out possibilities that technology tends to follow—at least to the extent that these coincide with the self-interested goals of corporations and the eagerness of consumers for novelty and convenience.

Technology brings us a facsimile of progress toward a utopian transhumanist vision; but the reality falls short on every front. While the rising tide of economic growth has lifted nearly every bit of flotsam, a few super-yachts are as close as we have come to Spaceship Earth. The ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality are ebbing, as the world turns back toward a modern-day feudalism. The dream of complete control of matter inevitably means control—by some—of the uses to which matter is put. And this implies control of consumer-users. The other side of that coin is the fact that the quest for self-control and individual virtue (traditionally through discipline and moral practice) has given way to a craze for convenience and novelty—the mass appeal of things whose alleged virtue is external and perhaps illusory.

But just how “labour-saving” is modern technology, actually? Does “autofill” really save time or is it more of a nuisance? Does constant updating of operating systems and hardware, or of automobiles and other appliances, really improve your life? Or does it just add to the challenge and expense of keeping up? Urban life seems a driven rat race for many, while others—living in cardboard boxes—cannot even get a foot on the treadmill. Social media turn out to be anti-social in their effects. Computer “literacy” results in illiterate babbling online and on the airwaves. There will soon be a world-wide crisis in electrical grids, as data centers consume ever more power to feed your AI personal assistant(s).

There is a corresponding crisis of “information.” Information that is supposed to result in an informed citizenry, and to serve the individual’s purposes and integrity, is displaced by “data” about them—to serve the purposes of exploitive corporations: namely, to convince you to give them what remains of your money. Your attention is now supposed to be the most valuable commodity, and the commercial or political aim is to capture and control it. Doesn’t the success of advertising suggest that consumers have no free will over their own attention and intention, no control over their own mind or desires? Perhaps the whole commercial mill would grind to a halt if people could not be tricked into buying its trinkets and novelties, many of which correspond poorly to real needs.

There is much talk in some circles of a “singularity,” when automation soon becomes so complete that humanity will have lost control over technological development. In truth, only a few humans have control over technological development right now. Chances are you are not one of them. An alternative possibility is a “crunch,” in which technological progress is stymied by its own internal contradictions—e.g., by how much it doesn’t reflect and serve actual human needs and even thwarts them. If progress is defined by profit for the few, it doesn’t represent the good of the many. If it means pollution, waste of resources, and harsher weather, then the crunch will also be ecological. We see this already in climate change and the Holocene mass extinction now underway.

Early on, our species was horrified by its precarious lot in the natural order. We didn’t like being vulnerable animals and so conceived an ideal realm of the gods outside the natural order, with the secret project to become god-like ourselves, in power if not in wisdom and beneficence. We sought to turn the tables on nature, displacing it with culture and artifact. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering now seem effective paths to that goal. But what if they lead to an unnatural order that we detest no less, dominated by human predators? Having long rebelled against the natural order and our own biological embodiment, might we come to be horrified by the technological order that displaces it?

Such questions are not merely philosophical, but existential and political. They confront individuals now—as producers, consumers, and citizens. With sufficiently widespread reflection and disenchantment, they could become collective choices, a rebellion or referendum against technocracy. To succeed, that would not be mere resistance to changing technology, but would seek to change the power structure that controls the production of technology. In other words: to rethink the very premises of capitalism, and its consumer base, which serve to maintain the status and power of an elite with diminishing consideration for the general good. The “big man” seems built into our primate nature; it is with some irony, then, that “big men” today promote digital technology that ideologically (an idealistically) promises to transcend our primate heritage, to lift us to the leisured realm of gods. We are told that technological progress is inevitable, as though our choices had nothing to do with it. And we tend to find it inherently desirable, as though it was not an instrument of power wielded by the few, potentially against us. But technology cannot be considered apart from who controls its production and why.

Revolutions have come and gone, and economies fluctuated, without changing power relations permanently in the long term. This seems to be where humanity is stuck: social progress toward equality is always stymied by the skill of elites to remain in control. But just as humans struggled, unconsciously and incrementally, against their subjection to the natural world, they could resist the techno-capitalist world that replaces it. Whatever its allure of convenience and modernity, to focus on technology per se is misleading; for it is but the instrument, and not the agent, of power. Concern that machines will take over the world masks the reality that it was long ago taken over by the powerful, for whom we are little more than drones. A different singularity looms: the accelerating concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands—which means that the control of information and of the means of production generally passes out of our control. That is the tipping point when ordinary people—not “humanity” in the abstract—will have irrevocably lost all power. Not lost to AI overlords, but to very human ones.