Technology Keeps Creating the Problems It Later Sells Us Solutions For

I was supposed to be asleep. It was around 11 p.m., I was winding down, and I made the classic mistake of opening my email. A message from a16z New Media landed in my inbox, and I started thinking about what tech media interviews leave out.

The interviews are polite. A founder explains how the company is saving the world, the interviewer asks one mildly interesting question, and everybody walks away feeling smarter. The question that rarely gets asked is the one regular people actually care about: who benefits, who pays, and what does daily life look like after the product arrives?

That is the job of an interviewer. The audience is not a room full of founders and venture investors who already agree that data centers are good, AI is inevitable, and the future is something they can announce into existence. Most of the country does not want a data center in the neighborhood. A lot of people do not understand why AI matters. They are allowed to ask what it does for them.

I am a tech positivist. I believe technology will solve serious problems. I also think people like you and I should ask why the problem appeared, who made money from it, and why the solution creates another bill.

The cycle is the product

Humans create a problem, build a tool to solve it, then create another problem with the solution. We repeat the process until the original problem becomes an industry and the side effect gets its own conference.

Maybe something is wrong with us. Maybe we are bored and need another project. I suspect both explanations are true.

I can connect the loop to Christianity and spirituality too. Maybe the answer is to stop treating the world like an endless product sprint, return to the faith, and accept a discipline that does not depend on the next device or market. I say that as somebody who found his way back to the faith without becoming especially holy. I still struggle with the cycle, which is probably why I am out walking and giving it more mental space.

We engineered a country you cannot walk through

The obesity epidemic starts before the medication. We made daily life so convenient that people can go through an entire day without walking anywhere, then we act surprised when their bodies respond to the environment.

I was walking through the subdivision I had just moved into. There were two cars in almost every driveway. The streets were laid out on a grid, the houses were pleasant enough, and the whole place was designed around getting into a vehicle. Once you leave the development, the road might as well be a highway from 60 years ago. It is built for 55 miles per hour, not for two pedestrians trying to reach a coffee shop.

I am grateful to live there. The environment is still hostile to walking.

That distinction matters because people love to moralize about obesity. They talk about discipline as if a person chose to live where the grocery store, coffee shop, pharmacy, and job are separated by roads designed for cars. I am not interested in the moral sermon. If daily life required more walking, many people would be healthier without ever joining a gym.

I learned that in Greece. I ate to excess at every meal. I had moussaka, spanakopita, baklava, and sweet frappe. I ate carbs with everything, then walked miles around the city to a conference, the Parthenon, the Agora, and the other historical sites.

After about 10 days, I came home three pounds lighter. I had not followed an organized workout plan. I had simply moved from place to place as a byproduct of living, and that movement outweighed the extra food.

The modern American environment removes that movement, then sells people a moral judgment about the result. That is a lousy deal for the person at the bottom of it.

The fix becomes another problem

Once enough people are affected, the market finds a way to sell the correction. We live in a capitalist society, so the monetary incentive to address obesity is enormous. The people who developed GLP-1 medication claimed that opportunity, and I understand why.

I have experimented with GLP-1 medication. It worked quickly for me, and I had very few side effects beyond some sleepiness. If you consider the downstream costs of obesity, including high blood pressure, heart attacks, and strokes, a medication that reduces those risks could lower the strain on the health care system.

I am still describing a cycle. We built an environment that makes people less active, created a health problem at scale, then developed a medication to manage the result. The medication may create its own side effects, and the next market will appear to solve those.

That is how the system keeps moving. A problem is created, a tool is built, a side effect arrives, and a new tool follows. The people selling each fix get to call the process progress, while the rest of us keep paying for the next stage.

The bill reaches the worker

The same logic shows up in labor markets. A company says it needs efficiency. A project moves to wherever the work is cheaper. Somebody else's life absorbs the transition.

India Today reported on an AI engineer who spent six years in the United States, worked at a Fortune 500 company for more than three years, and lost his job after the company moved his project to India. His H-1B status gave him 60 days to find another sponsor. The company kept the project. He had to decide whether to return to India or pursue another degree to stay.

Companies can move work. The useful question is who pays for the move. "Efficiency" describes the company's balance sheet, not the worker's life. The work is still there. The person who built a life around it is the disposable part.

That is the part of technology coverage that disappears inside the founder interview. The product is presented as progress. The costs become somebody else's personal failure.

I still want the technology

I want technology. I think the problems we face will be solved by technology, and I want the country to build things that improve ordinary life. I also want somebody responsible when the new system creates a new cost.

The move is simple: ask what the tool fixes, what it breaks, and who gets the bill. Then ask whether the original problem needed to exist in the first place.

Progress is real. So is the bill.

Find the rest of the work at drjoshcsimmons.com/links.