Rosalie Waelen

Ever find yourself wondering if seemingly convenient technologies are truly benefitting you? Perhaps you’d be less lonely without social media, less fixated on your health-metrics without your smart watch, less surveilled without targeted advertisements, and less frustrated without having to talk to customer service chatbots when you’re in need of help.

Why is it that we continuously adopt new forms of digitalization and automation, only to find ourselves feeling stuck in technology traps? The answer – or at least a part of it – is that we (mistakenly) equate technological progress with societal progress.

The myth of the Enlightenment

Modernity, at least in Europe, was marked by the Enlightenment period, which promised to replace religious guidance with rationality, reason, and autonomy. Despite these ideals, though, quite the opposite happened. In their 1947 book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that the masses – shaped by the media and entertainment industry – uncritically adopted the capitalist ideology and instrumental reason brought forward by modernity, rather than embracing the rationality and autonomy the Enlightenment had promised.

This dialectic is also visible today, in the age of AI, automation, and digitalization. While modern technologies are often thought of as showcasing human intelligence and ingenuity, these same technologies create dependencies and cause deskilling. It seems that the more advanced our technology becomes, the less we are capable of living without it. In other words, developments that were supposed to be liberating end up being dominating.

Social critique and the concept of progress

Stories about progress require a critical attitude, because they can be told in different ways. What may be a step forward (progress) for some, can simultaneously be a step backward (regress) for others. Stories about progress usually resemble a reading of history as a process from bad to better, but such stories are always told from a situated point of view. The same historical processes, that benefitted the storytellers, may have disadvantaged others and make up the dark pages in their respective history books. Narratives of progress therefore ought to be the object of social critique.

At the same time, however, progress is also the goal of critique. Critical theory does not prescribe a certain vision of what the future should look like, rather, the aim is to overcome the status quo by promoting emancipation. Hence, written into social critique is a certain conception of progress and a dependence on the notion. As a result, the concept of progress plays an ambivalent role in critical social theory: it is both the target of critique and the guiding ideal.

Narratives about AI and progress

In addition to backward-looking narratives about progress, that describe historical processes, stories about progress can also forecast future developments. When it comes to public and academic debates about artificial intelligence, both backward- and forward-looking narratives of progress play an ideological role.

For some of us, the notion of artificial intelligence emerged on our radar only recently, and we might equate AI with chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs). But the term has actually been around since 1956, and the idea behind it even longer. Historians and enthusiasts of technology often describe the emergence of AI as a bound-to-happen process. Citing famous old stories like ‘The Golem of Prague’, ‘Frankenstein’, and ‘The Wizard of Oz’, they argue that the development of AI expresses a deep-rooted, innate human desire of creating intelligence. This deterministic reading of the history of technology presents AI to us as a necessity – a force beyond our control. This history of technological progress is a powerful one, because it prevents people from questioning technological development or demanding involvement in it.

A similar ideological move can be seen in forward-looking narratives about the future of AI. Big tech companies such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, present the arrival of ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI) not only as a goal they want to achieve, but as an unavoidable and beneficial future scenario. In an interview for Bill Gates’ podcast, Sam Altman (OpenAI) said the following: “It’s going to be different for sure, but I think the only way out is through. We just have to go do this thing. It’s going to happen. This is like now an unstoppable technological course. The value is too great.” Similarly, the website of OpenAI states that “our research will eventually lead to artificial general intelligence, a system that can solve human- level problems” and its mission statement is described as ensuring that AGI “benefits all of humanity.”

The deterministic nature of this forward-looking narrative about AGI keeps people from envisioning and actively creating a different future. Moreover, it denies the possibility that what may look like progress to some, may not be understood as progress by others. The uncritical claim that AGI will benefit all of humanity expresses the enforcement of a certain conception of progress onto others – thereby showcasing the profound power of tech giants over society.

It’s not progress, it’s just change

‘Progress’ is a common term that we use in everyday language. The term can be used in a normative and a descriptive sense. However, despite this clear conceptual distinction, it is difficult to talk about technological progress only in the descriptive sense, without giving in to its normative connotation. We tend to associate technological progress with societal progress – and this is difficult to unlearn. When big tech companies tell us about technological prospects like AGI, we are likely to believe that we are moving forward. By the time we have grown critical about the true benefits of a technological development, we are usually already deeply locked-in to its infrastructure.

Have chatbots, smartwatches, social media, and other recent technological developments brought about societal progress? Or did these technologies first and foremost cause social change? Everyday life, social interactions, and even the structure of institutions, have changed drastically due to these developments. But whether these changes have been emancipatory, or “beneficial to all”, is a nuanced matter that is still up for debate.

Sometimes, as it turns out, a promising innovation did not actually bring about emancipatory progress, it did not improve society in any significant, all-encompassing way – it merely changed societal processes and dynamics. Sometimes, that’s all it is: technological change. And whether a specific instance of technological change is for the better, is a question that needs to be asked continuously – by philosophers of technology and critical social theorists, but also by policy makers, tech developers, and users themselves. 

Sources:

Allen, A. (2016). The End of Progress. Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Colombia University Press.

Forst, R. (2017). Normativity and Power. Analyzing Social Orders of Justification. C. Cronin (Trans.). Oxford:: Oxford University Press.

Forst, R. (2019). The justification of progress and the progress of justification. In A. Allen, & E. Mendieta (Eds.), Justification and Emancipation. The Critical Theory of Rainer Forst. (pp. 17– 37). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (1947). E. Jephcott (transl.), G. Schmidt Noeri (ed). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.

Waelen, R. & Bolte, L. (2025). Artificial Intelligence, Critical Theory, and the Concept of Progress. In M. Hähnel & R. Müller (Eds.) A Companion to Applied Philosophy of AI. Wiley.