It doesn't really matter what the technology is. At the end of the day, all technology is serving a purpose. That derives from human values and preferences. Technology is always used in an instrumentalist frame relative to its use -- which is always to serve a human end. This is basically just another way of repeating David Hume's famous insight, "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions".

The key to understanding this insight is understanding that any logical or rational system always serves a normative goal (a human passion). In other words, we don't do advanced industrial farming because the technology availed itself to us. We do it, because we want to eat more food, and the technology improved the fulfillment of that passion.

If you recognize this insight, you should be skeptical of ALL technological deterministic reasoning. The Sovereign Individual, Hyperbitcoinization, AI apocalypses, etc. Some of these things may have grains of truth in them, on a first principles basis about what social orders could be *possible* given these technologies. But possibility space is just that. The other part of the equation is the probability of outcomes within that probability space. So, when we ask ourselves, based on everything we know about human nature, culture, economics, do we think that these scenarios that the possibility space opened up by these technologies is a probable future?

I think the answer is no! No, it's not. Mainly because the entire conclusion rests on a technological deterministic argument! Which just doesn't epistemically make sense!

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What of the unforeseen externalities of technological development? Our passions dictate what we seek to invent/development, but often times what we believed were to be their only use cases, are not what they end up being used for. Wouldn’t these unforeseen use cases then change the political/social landscape with unintended, and sometimes, dire consequences? So isn’t it both?

Human nature is also highly deterministic (evolutionary biology, game theory)

Human nature + technology = deterministic outcomes