Why a Technocracy Fails Young People

As a chaplain at Harvard and MIT, I have been particularly concerned when talking to young people, who hope to be the next generation of American leaders. What moral lessons should they draw from the 2024 election? Elite institutions like those I serve have, after all, spent generations teaching young people to pursue leadership and success above all else. And, well, the former-turned-next POTUS has become one of the most successful political leaders of this century.

The electoral resurrection of a convicted felon whose own former chief of staff, a former Marine Corps General no less, likened him to a fascist, requires far more than re-evaluation of Democratic Party policies. It demands a re-examination of our entire society’s ethical—and even spiritual—priorities.

It’s not that students on campuses like mine want to be the next Trump (though he did win a majority among white, male, college-educated voters). It is, however, common for them to idolize billionaire tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Both Musk and Thiel factored significantly in Trump and Vance’s victory; both will be handsomely rewarded for their support.

But is a technocracy the best we can do as a model for living a meaningful life today? It is past time to recognize that the digital technologies with which many of us now interact from the moment we wake until the moment we drift into sleep (and often beyond that) have ceased to be mere “tools.” Just like we went from users to being the products by which companies like Facebook and Google make trillions in advertising revenue, we now have become the tools by which certain technologists can realize their grandest financial and political ambitions.

Policy reform alone—while necessary—won’t save us. But neither will tech figures like Musk or Theil. In fact, we need an alternative to an archetype that I like to call “The Drama of the Gifted Technologist,” of which Musk, Thiel, and other tech leaders have become avatars.

Based on the ideas of the noted 20th century psychologist Alice Miller, and on my observation of the inner lives of many of the world's most gifted students, the "Drama of the Gifted Technologist" starts with the belief that one is only "enough," or worthy of love and life, if one achieves extraordinary things, namely through leadership in tech or social media clout.

I’ve seen this "drama" become a kind of “official psychopathology of the Ivy League” and Silicon Valley. It began, in some ways, with the accumulation of “friends” on Facebook over a decade ago, to gain social relevance. And it has now graduated to become the psychological and even spiritual dynamic driving the current AI arms-race, also known as "accelerationism.” See for example the iNFLuential billionaire AI cheerleader VC Marc Andreessen's famous "Techno-Optimist's Manifesto," which uses the phrase "we believe" 133 times, arguing that "any deceleration of AI will cost lives..." and that "AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder." Or Sam Altman's urgent quest for trillions of dollars to create a world of AI "abundance,” consequences for the climate, democracy, or, say, biological weapons be damned. Or Thiel’s belief that one needs a "near-messianic attitude" to succeed in venture capital. Or young men's hero worship of tech "genius" figures like Musk, who, as former Twitter owner Jack Dorsey said, is the “singular solution”: the one man to single-handedly take humanity beyond earth, “into the stars.”

And why wouldn’t the drama of the gifted technologist appeal to young people? They live, after all, in a world so unequal, with a future so uncertain, that the fortunate few really do live lives of grandeur in comparison to the precarity and struggle others face.

Read More: Inside Elon Musk’s Struggle for the Future of AI

Still, some might dismiss these “ideas” as mere hype and bluster. I’d love to do so, too. But I've heard far too many "confessions" reminiscent of what famous AI "doomer" Eliezer Yudkowsky once said most starkly and alarmingly: that "ambitious people would rather destroy the world than never amount to anything."

Of course, I’m not saying that the aspiring leaders I work with are feeling so worthless and undeserving that they put themselves on a straight path from aspirational tech leadership towards world-destruction. Plenty are wonderful human beings. But it doesn’t take many hollow young men to destroy, if not the whole world, then at least far too much of it. Ultimately, many gifted young adults are feeling extraordinarily normal feelings: Fear. Loneliness. Grief. But because their “drama” doesn't permit them to simply be normal, they too often look for ways to dominate others, rather than connect with them in humble mutual solidarity.

In the spring of 2023, I sat and discussed all this over a long lunch with a group of about 20 soon-to-graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The students, in many cases deeply anxious about their individual and collective futures, asked me to advise them on how to envision and build ethical, meaningful, and sustainable lives in a world in which technological (and climate) change was causing them a level of uncertainty that was destabilizing at best, debilitating at worst. I suggested they view themselves as having inherent worth and value, simply for existing. Hearing that, one of the students responded—with laudable honesty and forthrightness—that she found that idea laughable.

I don’t blame her for laughing. It truly can be hard to accept oneself unconditionally, at a time of so much dehumanization. Many students I meet find it much easier to simply work harder. Ironically, their belief that tech success and wealth will save them strikes me as a kind of “digital puritanism”: a secularized version of the original Puritanism that founded Harvard College in the 1630's, in which you were either considered one of the world's few true elites, bound for Heaven, or if not, your destiny was the fire and brimstone vision of Hell. Perhaps tech’s hierarchies aren’t quite as extreme as traditional Puritanism’s, which allowed no way to alter destiny, and where the famous "Protestant work ethic" was merely an indicator of one's obvious predestination. But given the many ways in which today's tech is worsening social inequality, the difference isn't exactly huge.

The good news? Many reformers are actively working to make tech more humane.

Among those is MacArthur fellow and scholar of tech privacy Danielle Citron, an expert in online abuse, who told me she worries that gifted technologists can “…lose their way behind screens, because they don’t see the people whom they hurt.”

“To build a society for future cyborgs as one’s goal,” Citron continued, “suggests that these folks don’t have real, flesh and blood relationships…where we see each other in the way that Martin Buber…described.”

Buber, an iNFLuential Jewish philosopher whose career spanned the decades before and after the Holocaust, was best known for his idea, first fully expressed in his 1923 essay “I and Thou,” that human life finds its meaning in relationships, and that the world would be better if each of us imagined our flesh-and-blood connections with one another—rather than achievements or technologies—as the ultimate expression of our connection to the divine.

Indeed. I don’t happen to share Buber’s belief in a divine authority; I’m an atheist and humanist. But I share Buber’s faith in the sacredness of human interrelationship. And I honor any form of contemporary spiritual teaching, religious or not, that reminds us to place justice, and one another’s well-being, over ambition—or “winning.”

We are not digital beings. We are not chatbots, optimized for achievement and sent to conquer this country and then colonize the stars through infinite data accumulation. We are human beings who care deeply about one another because we care about ourselves. Our very existence, as people capable of loving and being loved, is what makes us worthy of the space we occupy, here in this country, on this planet, and on any other planet we may someday find ourselves inhabiting.