Why is Silicon Valley’s obsession with logic destroying the world?
By Greg Satell | Published: 2025-10-29 09:30:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
Take a moment to think about what the world should have looked like JP Morgan A century ago, before his death in 1913. He was an astute investor in emerging technologies such as railroads, automobiles, and electricity, and was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his home. Today we would call him a Techno optimist.
He could not have imagined the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocide, the rise of fascism and communism, and the decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have wondered how things had gotten this far, despite so many scientific and technological advances.
Today, we are at a similar juncture, and it is already here Disturbing similarities to the 1920sincluding paradigm-shifting technologies, the revolt against immigration, globalization, income inequality, and even a global pandemic. Now, as then, the choices we make will shape our future for decades to come. We need those who create the future to be rooted in the world in which we live. But they are not
Building for a rational world
In the 1920s, a group of intellectuals in Berlin and Viennalike many Silicon Valley makers today, became fascinated by Engineering mindset. By this time, technologies like the one Morgan invested in were beginning to reshape the world. Like a lot DescartesThree centuries ago, they believed that logic and rationality should govern human affairs
He was their saint Ludwig WittgensteinTheir holy book was his book messagewhich described a world composed of “.Atomic factsIt is possible to combine these things to create “situations”. He famously concluded that “where one cannot speak, one must remain silent,” meaning that everything that cannot be expressed in logical form must be ignored.
Intellectuals named their movement Logical positivism And lean on it Verification principle. Only verifiable propositions will be taken as meaningful. All other statements will be treated as nonsense. Basically, if it didn’t fit the algorithm, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.
But unfortunately, again like today’s Silicon Valley residents, the logical positivists’ overconfidence belies a serious problem beneath the surface. Indeed, while intellectuals in Berlin and Vienna were trying to put the social sciences on a more logical footing, logic itself was undergoing a transformation. Founding crisis Which threatened the entire positivist project
At the root of the crisis there was something called… Russell’s paradoxwhich created strange and contradictory expressions, such as “The barber shaves every man in the city who does not shave himself.” Suppose such a barber exists and you are tied in knots. It seemed like a small technical wrinkle, but it was basically a crack that required repair.
Broken logic
David HilbertOne of the most prominent mathematicians of that time, Suggest a programme To solve the foundational crisis. It was based on three pillars. First, the mathematics must be proven to be complete so that each statement can be proven true or false. Second, the mathematics must appear consistent, and no contradictions or paradoxes are allowed. Finally, all statements must be computable, meaning they give a clear answer.
Hilbert and his colleagues received the answer sooner than most people expected. In 1931, just 11 years after Hilbert developed his program, the 25-year-old Kurt Gödel Post him Incompleteness theorems. The result shocked the mathematician. Gödel showed that any sufficiently strong logical system can be either complete or consistent, but not both.
In simpler terms, Godel demonstrated that every formal system will eventually collapse. It will contain real data that cannot be proven within the system itself. Logic will remain forever limited, and the positivists’ hopes will be dashed. You cannot engineer a society based on a logical system that is itself inherently incomplete. For better or worse, the world will still be a messy place.
However, the consequences of the fall of logic turned out to be much different, and far more bizarre, than anyone expected. In 1936, based on Godel’s proof, Alan Turing He published his own Paper on Hilbert’s arithmetic problem. As with the Austrian, he found that all problems are not calculable, but with a positive side. As part of his evidence, he included a description of A Simple machine It can calculate every computable number.
Ironically, a Turing machine would do that Entering a new era of digital computing. These machines, built with the understanding that they will eventually break down, have proven to be incredibly useful, as long as we accept them for what they are – faulty machines. As it turns out, to solve big, important problems, we often need to get rid of our illusions first.
Thinking about building a home
The basis of the project was positivism Rational assumption That we can overcome the flaws of human nature with pure, flawless logic. However, exactly the opposite happened. The 1930s and 1940s saw the rise of ideologies that claimed to be more “scientific,” only to see the world descend into the abyss of war and genocide.
And in the aftermath, amid the rubble and horror, the world needed to rebuild. This in turn requires some thinking about how and in what form. It was during this period that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger He wrote his article, Building dwelling thinkingwhere he said that in order to build for the world you must know what it means to live in it: Â
“Building and thinking, each in its own way, are inevitable for inhabitation. But neither are they sufficient for inhabitation as long as each is busy with his own affairs in separation instead of listening to each other. They are capable of listening if construction and thinking belong to inhabitation, if they remain within their limits and realize that one comes from the workshop of long experience and constant practice.
There is a fundamental difference between something designed for the way people actually live and live, and something designed to serve an abstract idea. You feel it when you’re trying to navigate an AI-powered customer service experience, or a self-service menu at an airport bar. When I lived in Moscow in 2003 and 2004, I was struck by constant reminders that the city was not designed for living, but for something else.
There is something inhuman about a world built only for thought and separated from inhabitation. Perhaps this is why companies like Apple, Pixar, and Patagonia, which are able to coordinate building and dwelling and think deeply and consistently, win such devotion, because something that seems to be built for us affirms our health in a deeply human way.
People are careless
in People are carelessformer CEO of Meta Sarah Wayne Williams She describes the Silicon Valley executives she worked with as so wealthy and powerful that they became out of touch with many of the realities of the world. At one point, during a discussion about the cost of internet service for refugees, she described a senior leader’s surprise when he realized that refugee camp residents had no jobs.
Today, we increasingly live in a world Visceral abstractwhere the technologies that shape our lives are deeply rooted in concepts, such as Quantum mechanics and Natural selectionit cannot be experienced directly. This is especially true for next generation technologies, e.g artificial intelligence, Synthetic biology and Quantum computing.Â
When you design for the physical world, for example, by building a bridge, there are natural reactions if the construction and thinking are out of harmony with the dwelling. People can get where they want to go or they can’t. The path is smooth or bumpy. The view is beautiful or ugly. We notice the flaws, if not immediately, then eventually. But they come to light and can be corrected
But in the world of deep abstraction, things are not so concrete. Nation-states can manipulate us on social media, our chatbots can alter our psychology, and our genome can be engineered to interact with our environment in new and different ways, without us even realizing it. As technologies become more powerful, the possibilities for good and evil multiply
This requires us not just to be careful, but to be connected – not just to think and build, but also to live. We should be skeptical of those who sell us visions of impeccable logic; These visions are not only incomplete, but they are inhumane. At some point, something is bound to break.
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(Tags for translation)Big Tech
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