I began writing about technology and culture around 2010. It didn’t take long for me to recognize one of the most common tropes deployed by those whose business it was to promote new technologies. It was the trope of technological inevitability. By 2012, I wrote about how those who deployed this trope suffered from a Borg Complex. Alluding to the cybernetic alien race in the Star Trek universe, I defined a Borg Complex as a malady that afflicts “technologists, writers, and pundits who explicitly assert or implicitly assume that resistance to technology is futile.”

The first time I identified the tendency in this way, I argued that “the spirit of the Borg lives in writers and pundits who take it upon themselves to prod on all of those they deem to be deliberately slow on the technological uptake. These self-appointed evangelists of technological assimilation would have us all abandon any critique of technology and simply adapt to the demands of technological society.”

I then proceeded to outline a series of symptoms by which we might diagnose someone with a Borg complex:
1. Makes grandiose, but unsupported claims for technology
2. Uses the term Luddite a-historically and as a casual slur
3. Pays lip service to, but ultimately dismisses genuine concerns
4. Equates resistance or caution to reactionary nostalgia
5. Starkly and matter-of-factly frames the case for assimilation
6. Announces the bleak future for those who refuse to assimilate
7. Expresses contemptuous disregard for past cultural achievements
8. Refers to historical antecedents solely to dismiss present concerns

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In fact, it sometimes seems to me as if the adoption of AI is driven chiefly by the rhetoric of inevitability exacerbated by the related logics of the prisoner’s dilemma and an arms race. Indeed, it is a curious fact that some of the very people who are ostensibly convinced of the inevitability of AI nonetheless lack the confidence you would think accompanied such conviction and instead seem bent on exerting their power and wealth to make certain that AI is imposed on society. I’m calling this tendency, with a nod to Herman and Chomsky, manufactured inevitability.

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As a German-born Jew who had witnessed the Nazi regime firsthand, Weizenbaum emphasized that the “common ground” between Nazi ideology and AI zealotry was “the degradation of the human and the fantasy of a perfect new man that must be created at all costs.” At the end of such visions, he warned, “man is no longer there. He disappears.” In drawing attention to these parallels, Weizenbaum combated the reductionism of the computer metaphor that still persists today.

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Weizenbaum understood that when technology seems unstoppable, there's a pretext for discounting individual acts of courage. People should not be portrayed as “innocent victims” of technology. When people are held accountable, technological outcomes are no longer inevitable: “The myth of technological and political and social inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But in fact there are actors” (Weizenbaum 1976: 241).