It’s comforting to believe technology is going to save the world.

MedPage Today has an article about how tech is saving lives during COVID, such as:

1. 3D Printing to let humans in Spain make personal protective equipment (PPE).

2. Bluetooth and wireless signals from smartphones to enable contact tracing in countries like South Korea and Singapore.

3. Telehealth. Telemedicine. Take a picture or video of a lump under your breast or something else you’re concerned about, send it to your doctor, get medical advice on the spot.

But also consider what Doug Tompkins, cofounder of retail brand The North Face, says in this 2013 Guardian article:

"Hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production, you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up… You see mining, transportation, manufacturing, computers, high-speed communications, satellite communications, it's all there."

The computer is a mechanism for acceleration.

Economic activity becomes so much faster when you have a computer that can do almost everything, from client devices like laptops and smartwatches and smartphones, to servers running worldwide.

My iPhone wakes me up in the morning, then I sit at my Mac to teach a class. Then I go for a walk and track workouts with my Apple Watch.

Apple sits not only on my desk, but in my pocket. And on my wrist. Not to mention a $3 trillion market capitalization.

Pretty soon Apple Glasses might even be on our faces. Or Microsoft, or Google, or Facebook (aka Meta).

After work ends I turn on my PlayStation 5 and play Call of Duty Warzone with friends, like I did when the PS3 and PS4 came out.

PlayStation is a computing device. We think of it as a toy, but it’s a fancy computer too, with a power supply and hard drive and RAM and so on.

Basically, my life since 1996 was wrapped up in the techno-industrial culture Tompkins talks about.

Tompkins was a friend of Steve Jobs, actually. The two men had many arguments.

The former Apple CEO tried convincing Tompkins that computers were going to save the world. Tompkins kept insisting the opposite.

Tompkins points out that while individuals use computers largely for their own narrow interests, large corporations are the big winners as they are able to take advantage of a person’s narrow needs to become ever more powerful.

Like social media companies. Or other Big Tech companies. We use social media for virtuous things like connecting with family and friends worldwide, but also our own narrow interests.

We want to create thirst traps, fear of missing out, and envy in others just as much as we want to avoid consuming it. But in the end it’s the free platforms we use that become the big, omnipresent winners.

Because if something is free, you are the product.

So no. Technology is absolutely not going to save the world.

People like you and me are, by funding nonprofits like Per Scholas or Charity: Water.

Because it’s not the technology you own that matters.

It’s what you do with it.