As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to recognize my interest in computers comes from a place similar to a person who enjoys model trains or Legos. I enjoy tinkering with computers because I like understanding how things work. I like the interplay of hardware and software, and I like that computers, like my favorite bicycle, very often feels like an extension of myself. Unlike a bicycle, however, a computer is not and has not ever been a simple machine. And this is at odds with my thoughts and feelings about the interaction of people in their place and time.
Culturally, computer people have historically been interested in making computers do things. Much of AI chatter today, in April 2026, is nominally around that. There are people tinkering with all sorts of things to see what it can do, much of it silly, some of it perhaps useful in some way.
But over time, a class of people move in and start seeking ways to make money above all else and the system that was once designed for modest and otherwise sustainable growth must begin to expand. Growth at all costs leads to some artificial culture and results that are inherently unsustainable.
To name one example from the past century, it used to be that people truly did live from the energy of the sun. The sun was free, and it fed plants that fed people and animals. Animals could often do the work humans couldn’t, "10x-ing" their output on their land to grind wheat or mill flour or any number of other things.
Free sunshine and grass, like basically the entire Linux community today, doesn’t do much for money-making. So the artificialists move in, seeking to weaken the connections between people and their otherwise freely available resource and replacing it with something else, like mechanization that is costly and, often, full of its own harms and tradeoffs. One of which is that machines get bigger and faster, whereas people and organic life tend not to. There is a built-in limit that shows obvious boundaries, probably for the better. Capitalism, in other words, doesn’t really like that.
To name one other example at the risk of sounding awful, I have long wrestled with the question of whether or not capitalism could or would have ended slavery.
Many tech companies today will say it is of no use to regulate them or pass laws requiring this or that because "the industry moves so fast, who knows what will come next, but I’m sure it’ll work out." This is sometimes the case. Europe requiring specific cell phone charging ports strikes me as a little silly and short-sighted. It’s not unreasonable we might discover a more efficient, energy-saving way of charging a gadget that requires a new port, wire, or adaptation.
Still, the theory being that capitalism will right itself.
So: could or would capitalism have ever corrected the obvious wrong of slavery? To contemporary people it seems obvious to ask, "If slavery was so wrong, why didn’t they just…stop?"
And the best analogy I have come to for our modern day is tipping. "If tipping is so backward and harmful to so many, why don’t we just stop?" And the answer, as obviously meager as it is to compare tipping to slavery, is still the same: an economic reality that is hard to break.
If you ran a restaurant and didn’t like tipping, you could "just stop tips" and, presumably, just pay your staff more as a result. Except your food or drinks are now considerably more expensive, indeed obviously more expensive than nearby establishments. You might be able to get away with it if you have a geographic monopoly (like you’re the only coffee shop around), or, your food is so unique and so good it can’t be ignored. But people have fixed ideas about how much a cheeseburger or a salad or a cup of coffee costs.
We see this with coffee shops that try to eliminate tips and suddenly the cost of the coffee on the register is $8 and not $5 or whatever it is or was. So, you realize, even if you leave the tip, "Hey, the place just down the street is $3 cheaper." This is spectacularly stupid and short-sighted, but, hey, we’re humans and in aggregate this is what happens. Suddenly, the shop loses business and folds.
Slavery was, in effect, the same problem. It’s really hard to just "stop having free labor" when your neighbor has free labor, or someone else decides they’re okay with free labor. Who is going to buy your crop when it costs 2-3x more for not discernible difference in quality? I am not the first to have this idea. Plenty of our founders wrestled with this.
The British eliminated slavery by simply paying people to stop having slaves. A debt they only just paid off in 2015:
In 1834, the British government outlawed slavery in Britain and its American possessions, though not in its Asian colonies such as British India and what would become Sri Lanka.
The British government also paid 20 million pounds – the equivalent of around 17 billion pounds today – to compensate slave owners for the lost capital associated with freeing slaves. This payout was a massive 40% of the government’s budget and required many bonds to slave owners to effectuate the law.
These obligations to slave owners and institutions are the debts that were paid off by the UK government only in 2015.
In this case, it took the full force of government to flatten the economic disparity. In the U.S., we chose the Civil War, with its own economic disparities before, during, and after.
What does all this have to do with AI?
As people become dependent on an economic system, or tool, a radical change occurs in their minds. Where people were once focused on the sun and biology and the health (or abuse) of living things, we abstract away another layer of ourselves. Technology, economics, and financial markets and credit become as important as the weather. To which bigger machines, more power, more energy, more and more and on and on leaves survivors clinging to "success" by way of debt, mortgages, and precarious methods to the ruin of their neighbors, community, and minds. Where a focus on speed, efficiency, and profitability become the only standards for performance, and those standards are all industrial, not humane. They lack a sense of respect for seasonality, time, pride, quality, and respect.
