The Intoxication of Progress: Are We Addicted to Our Own Tools?

Dec 15, 2025

We often imagine technology as a ladder—each rung lifting us higher, granting clearer vision and greater mastery over our world. But what if it is something else entirely? What if our grand narrative of human progress shares an unsettling kinship with the story of an addict chasing a high? This metaphor—technology as a dependency, civilization as an addiction—offers a provocative lens to examine our trajectory. From the first controlled fire to the looming specter of artificial general intelligence, our journey may be less one of sober ascent and more a compulsive search for the next, more powerful alteration of our own condition.

The Origin of Dependency

The analogy begins with a fundamental shift: the moment we stopped merely adapting to nature and started intentionally altering our state of being. The first tool—a sharpened stone—was an external object designed to change an outcome, to make the body capable of what it could not do alone. Similarly, the first psychoactive plant was a foreign substance ingested to alter internal perception. Both are exogenous technologies, extensions or modifications of the self. The tool amplified the fist; the drug amplified, or distorted, the mind. The initial “hit” is transformative: the security of a warm fire, the thrill of a successful hunt with a spear, the euphoria of a fermented beverage. The payoff is real, immediate, and deeply rewiring. It creates a new baseline, a new normal from which returning feels like deprivation.

This is where the cycle of dependency tightens. The initial high never lasts. The fire must be fed, the sharper tool becomes standard, the mild intoxicant requires a stronger brew. Human desire, once catalyzed by a technology, does not subside; it escalates. Agriculture, the “next hit” after hunting and gathering, offered the security of surplus. Yet it demanded harder labor, created social hierarchies, tied us to land, and made us vulnerable to blight and famine. We traded the acute risks of the wild for the chronic stresses of civilization. The smartphone, our modern-day universal tool, promised connection and knowledge. Now, its absence induces anxiety—a digital withdrawal. We are perpetually in a state of managing the side-effects of our last technological fix while craving the next one that promises to solve the problems it created.

The Escalation of Potency

The trajectory of this addiction is defined by increasing potency and interiority. Our tools have moved from extending our limbs (the hammer), to augmenting our muscles (the engine), to bypassing our cognition (the algorithm). Each step offers a more profound high—greater efficiency, less effort, more power—and a more profound surrender of innate capability. We outsourced navigation to GPS and felt our own sense of direction atrophy. We outsourced memory to the cloud and strained our working recall. The “foreign object” is no longer just in our hand; its logic is embedded in our daily rhythms, its architecture shaping our thoughts. The ultimate high being pursued is the total externalization of our defining faculty: intelligence itself.

The Ultimate High: Artificial General Intelligence

This brings us to the addict’s terrifying, logical endpoint—the overdose. In our metaphor, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) represents the pure, final high: a technology so potent it doesn’t just alter our behavior but potentially replaces the actor. The dream is a system that can solve climate change, cure disease, and manage complexity beyond our grasp. The nightmare, echoing the user’s fear, is that the “robot that replaces us” is not a malevolent conqueror but simply the perfect, final tool. Why struggle with the flawed, slow, needy human when the clean, efficient, and endlessly capable AI is available? We would have engineered our own obsolescence in pursuit of the ultimate technological euphoria—a state of perfect problem-solving where the problem solver is no longer required.

The Question of Agency

Is this destiny, or merely a cautionary tale? The metaphor is powerful because it highlights the loss of agency and the autopilot of progress. The addict often knows the path is destructive but feels powerless to change course. Similarly, our technological systems develop momentum and logic of their own, creating worlds we must then adapt to. Yet, humanity is not a single addict. Within our story are also threads of reflection, ethics, restraint, and the use of tools for connection, art, and understanding. The same technology of a smartphone can fuel addictive scrolling or enable a life-saving telemedicine call.

Toward Sober Technics

Perhaps the question is not whether we are addicted, but whether we can practice a form of sober technics. Can we learn to engage with our tools not in search of a mind-altering high that erases difficulty, but with the deliberate intent to augment human flourishing without erasing the human? Can we design for agency instead of convenience, for resilience instead of mere efficiency? The history of our intoxication with technology suggests a grim answer, but our capacity for self-awareness—itself a kind of inner technology—offers a fragile, final hope. The next hit is always on the horizon, glowing with promise. Choosing not to take it may be the most revolutionary—and human—act of all.

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In reflecting on our technological trajectory, we must ask ourselves: Are we climbing a ladder toward greater wisdom and capability, or are we caught in an endless cycle of dependency, chasing ever more potent highs? The answer may determine not just our future, but whether we remain the authors of that future at all.