I feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best. It’s not

I feel like people in tech like to ascribe causality to evolution. As if “Evolution” is some sort of sentient, God-like entity that knows what’s best. It’s not. It’s a theory. The core tenet of evolution is that organisms adapt to their environment. All organisms are capable of modifying their environment such that they improve their odds of survival. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Trees drop seeds in clever ways. Humans do an upgraded version of all those things. Technology (in the broadest sense of the term) is really about tweaking the environment to increase our odds of survival. Sometimes, these experiments backfire. It happens to all species. It just happens to be globally-disruptive in the case of humans. Frankly, all this talk about how “social evolution has hijacked the dopaminergic pathways of the brain” sounds like the ramblings of someone who recently read a pop-science book about the brain.