Once it is there, it is there forever
When techno-solutionism and function creep combine
It should be obvious at this point that our societies are becoming increasingly reliant and dominated by technology.
In his book The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century, Suleyman identifies several factors that drive this trend. These include:1
Competition. Technological innovation is required to gain an advantage over others, and this applies to companies and countries.
Open Research. The global research ecosystem rewards new ideas.
Financial Gains. Technological innovation often leads to more profits or higher GDP.
Ego. Entrepreneurs and innovators are driven by the mission of becoming a ‘somebody’ and bookmarking their place in history.
But one driver that Suleyman does not elaborate on is that of crises; when a significant adverse event happens, technological solutions are often sought to mitigate or remedy the damage.
This was the case for the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. Technological solutions were pursued for contact tracing, developing vaccines and digital vaccine passports.
Such tech solutions often come with the promise that their use will be constrained to the crisis, with their nature and scope predominantly dictated by the needs of the emergency. However, this is not always true.
Take the recent Paris Olympics, where, for security purposes, AI tools were applied to CCTV footage to identify suspicious activity such as crowd movements and abandoned items. Such measures find their legal basis in a controversial surveillance law passed by French legislators in 2023 to deal with what the French interior minister called the "biggest security challenge any country has ever had to organize in a time of peace."
But such algorithmic video surveillance (AVS) has partly been made possible by the installation of thousands of cameras in Paris after the Bataclan terrorist attacks in 2015. In fact, such attacks marked a major turning point in French security law, with the accompanying surveillance infrastructure being used as part of the country's Covid-19 response years after the event:
The police have used such cameras to enforce pandemic lockdown measures and monitor protests like those of the Gilets Jaunes. And a new nationwide security law, adopted [in 2021], allows for video surveillance by police drones during events like protests and marches.
Similarly, even after the conclusion of the Olympics, AVS remains in Paris and will do so until 2025. As TechRadar reported in August:
"The ongoing experiments are the first step towards the legalization of these technologies,"  Félix Tréguer, a member of the digital rights advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, told me. "Each time, those large events are used as a way to legitimize controversial surveillance practices that then stay in the long run. In that respect, France is no exception."
These examples of techno-solutionism combined with function creep demonstrate that technological development is not an inevitable or natural phenomenon. It is the result of intentional actions taken by humans, some of which can have unintended or undesirable consequences:
Technology is pushed on by all too rudimentary and fundamentally human drivers. From curiosity to crises, fortune to fear, at its heart technology emerges to fill human needs. If people have powerful reasons to build and use it, it will get built and used. Yet in most discussions of technology people still get stuck in what it is, forgetting why it was created in the first place. This is not about some innate techno-determinism. This is about what it means to be human.2
If the incentives are powerful enough, once a technological solution is implemented, it can be there forever.
Mustafa Suleyman, 'Chapter 8: Unstoppable Incentives' in The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma (The Bodley Head 2015).
Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma (The Bodley Head 2015), p.119.