When Technology Promises the Future but Forgets the Human Being
Two recent stories in The Wall Street Journal stayed with me.
The first concerned Meta’s agreement to pay as much as $18 billion to settle claims brought by 48 state attorneys general over the alleged harm Facebook and Instagram caused to teenagers.
The second described the dramatic fall of Leopold Aschenbrenner, a 24-year-old investor once celebrated as the “Nostradamus of AI.”
At first glance, these may seem like unrelated stories. One is about social media and children. The other is about artificial intelligence, finance, ambition, and a young man’s extraordinary rise and fall.
But beneath the headlines lies a common question: What happens when human beings place too much confidence in technology and in the people who claim to understand it?
The price of capturing attention
Meta’s settlement is enormous: up to $18 billion over the next decade. The agreement includes a default two-hour daily limit for users under 18, nighttime restrictions, reduced push notifications during school hours, stronger age-assurance measures, and additional parental controls. Meta has denied wrongdoing, even as it agreed to these changes.
The financial penalty is striking, but the deeper issue cannot be measured in dollars alone.
For years, social-media companies refined the art of keeping people engaged. Every notification, recommendation, “like,” and endlessly refreshed screen was designed to bring the user back. Adults, with their greater experience and more developed judgment, have found it difficult enough to resist this machinery of attention. Teenagers, still forming their identities and emotional habits, were placed directly in its path.
A young person may open an application simply to see a friend’s photograph and remain there for an hour, absorbing an unending stream of comparison, approval, anxiety, advertising, and controversy. The technology does not need to shout. It merely needs to keep offering one more image, one more message, one more reason not to put the phone down.
The settlement is therefore more than a legal transaction. It is an acknowledgment however incomplete, that technology companies cannot escape responsibility by saying that users freely chose to remain online.
Freedom becomes complicated when an environment is deliberately engineered to make leaving difficult.
A settlement, but not a final answer
The agreement represents progress, but it does not solve every problem. The settlement does not require Meta to abandon personalized recommendations or targeted advertising. It also leaves unresolved some of the most troubling content connected to body image and social comparison.
This reminds us that regulation often arrives after a technology has already entered the intimate spaces of family life.
The responsibility cannot rest entirely with parents. A parent may establish household rules, but a family is negotiating against teams of engineers, behavioral specialists, advertisers, and investors whose professional purpose is to maximize engagement.
Nor can the responsibility rest entirely with schools. Teachers already carry the burden of educating children, maintaining discipline, and addressing mental-health concerns. They cannot be expected to repair every consequence of a digital environment designed elsewhere.
The technology companies themselves must accept a larger share of responsibility. If they profit from a child’s attention, they must also accept responsibility for the conditions under which that attention is obtained.
The young prophet of artificial intelligence
The second Journal article tells a different story, about Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24-year-old investor who attracted billions and was hailed by some as the “Nostradamus of AI.” The article portrays a figure whose confidence and bold predictions helped create an aura of unusual foresight before his AI-focused fund suffered a devastating collapse.
The image is almost literary: a young man speaking of buying galaxies, surrounded by people willing to believe that his vision extended far beyond ordinary human limits.
Yet the tragedy is not simply that one investor made bad bets. The larger lesson concerns the human tendency to turn intelligence into mythology. We are often dazzled by confidence, especially when it is expressed in the language of the future. A person who speaks fluently about artificial intelligence, economic transformation, or civilization’s destiny can quickly be treated as more than an analyst. He becomes a prophet.
But a brilliant prediction is still a prediction. A compelling narrative is not the same as evidence. And knowledge in one domain does not automatically confer wisdom in every other domain.The future is not defeated merely because someone has described it persuasively.
The danger of technological certainty
In the first story, certainty took the form of a business model that assumed the more attention a platform captured, the better. The emotional and developmental consequences for teenagers were treated as secondary to growth.
In the second, certainty took the form of a vision of AI so powerful that extraordinary financial risks could appear justified. The imagined future became more persuasive than the warning signs in the present.
Both stories remind us that technology is not an independent force floating above society. It is created by people, financed by people, promoted by people, and used by people. It reflects our desires, our hunger for profit, status, convenience, influence, and the feeling that we are participating in history. The machine may be new. The human weaknesses are ancient.
What older generations may see clearly
As a senior observer of technological change, I find myself thinking about the value of perspective. Many of us grew up in a world in which waiting was unavoidable. We waited for letters, telephone calls, printed newspapers, photographs to be developed, and news to arrive through scheduled broadcasts. That slower world had frustrations, but it also gave the mind room to breathe.
Today’s younger generation has inherited an environment of immediate response. They are expected to answer quickly, react publicly, and remain constantly available. The phone is not merely a device; for many young people, it has become a social environment, a diary, a classroom, a stage, and sometimes a judge.
Older people should not romanticize the past. Every generation faces its own pressures, and earlier societies had many dangers of their own. But age can offer one useful advantage: distance.
Having lived through several waves of technological optimism, we know that every invention arrives with promises. It will save time. It will democratize knowledge. It will make life easier. Sometimes it does. But it may also create new forms of dependence, inequality, distraction, and harm. The proper response is neither panic nor worship. It is judgment.
A lesson for a worldwide audience
These stories are American in their immediate legal and financial details, but their meaning is global. Children in Manila, Mumbai, Nairobi, London, São Paulo, and Walnut Creek encounter the same platforms and many of the same pressures. The influence of Silicon Valley does not stop at national borders. Nor does the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence.
Countries may differ in language, culture, religion, and economic circumstance, but parents everywhere ask similar questions: Is my child safe online?
Who is responsible when an application causes harm?
Can we distinguish genuine innovation from extravagant promotion?
How much of our future should be entrusted to people who are still learning how to understand the present?
These are not anti-technology questions. They are human questions.
Technology should enlarge human possibility, not diminish human dignity. It should help children learn rather than exploit their vulnerability. It should assist imagination rather than replace judgment. And those who make grand predictions about the future should be judged not only by their brilliance, but also by their humility, discipline, and willingness to acknowledge uncertainty.
The two Journal stories offer a quiet warning. The future will not be shaped only by machines, markets, or visionary individuals. It will also be shaped by the values we insist upon when the excitement becomes overwhelming.
We should welcome innovation. But we should never confuse novelty with wisdom, popularity with truth, or confidence with foresight.
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