Dr David Bratt

Up to a cou­ple months ago, the fu­ture of tech seemed to be a sure thing. The elec­tion of a US Pres­i­dent backed heav­i­ly by the “Tech Bros,” as if a set of racist white bil­lion­aires could take over black-speak, the rise in tech stock, the use of tech in ed­u­ca­tion and the mil­i­tary, the dra­mat­ic in­crease in AI da­ta cen­tres, the talk about how AI was about to rev­o­lu­tionise so­ci­ety, cul­ture, med­i­cine, the West In­dies crick­et team, sex, ca­lyp­so, etc etc, ap­peared to fore­tell a change in hu­man for­tunes if not val­ues.

How times have changed, sub­tle in some cas­es, bla­tant­ly in oth­ers.

The MA­GA move­ment backed by the Tech Bros has fall­en, al­though much life re­mains. Last week, a US midterms vot­er poll sug­gest­ed da­ta cen­tres were a mo­ti­vat­ing is­sue for many Amer­i­cans to vote against the gov­ern­ment, lead­ing some to ar­gue pub­lic back­lash against the ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) in­fra­struc­ture con­struc­tion boom might have helped shape the elec­tion out­come.

Over half of US vot­ers (56 per cent) came out against AI and da­ta cen­tres. Gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion (90 per cent ); cost of liv­ing (89 per cent); the war in Iran (74 per cent) and ICE (73 per cent) were the oth­er main rea­sons peo­ple vot­ed against Pres­i­dent Trump and his gang.

The midterms al­so rat­tled AI stocks, as the out­look for com­pa­nies tied to AI was thrown in­to doubt. The S&P 500 fell 4.36 per cent, the biggest one-day de­cline since 2025. The tech-fo­cused Nas­daq in­dex al­so fell 5.52 per cent on the same day, fu­elling wor­ries that the AI bub­ble could soon pop. US volatil­i­ty quick­ly spread to oth­er mar­kets around the world.

All this comes against the back­drop of tech com­pa­nies be­ing sued for large sums of mon­ey by in­di­vid­u­als and US state at­tor­neys gen­er­al. In Au­gust, Meta reached an 18-bil­lion-dol­lar set­tle­ment to re­solve a land­mark law­suit brought by a coali­tion of 29 US states, af­ter be­ing ac­cused in court of de­sign­ing In­sta­gram and Face­book to ex­ploit child and teen psy­cho­log­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, fu­elling harm­ful so­cial me­dia ad­dic­tion, il­le­gal­ly col­lect­ing da­ta from chil­dren un­der 13 with­out parental con­sent, and mis­lead­ing the pub­lic about youth safe­ty.

In Cal­i­for­nia, ac­cord­ing to the Guardian, “thou­sands of co­or­di­nat­ed cas­es have been filed in state court against Meta, YouTube, Tik­Tok and Snap. Meta and YouTube lost the first of those cas­es to go to tri­al in Feb­ru­ary, be­ing or­dered to pay $6m to the young woman who brought the suit.”

Oth­ers are pend­ing. “The law­suits have bor­rowed from the le­gal ap­proach used against to­bac­co com­pa­nies in the 1990s, which fo­cused on cig­a­rettes’ ad­dic­tive qual­i­ties and the mak­ers’ knowl­edge that their prod­ucts caused harm.”

Tech com­pa­nies cause harm to chil­dren! I wrote on Oc­to­ber 6 that “it’s worth a re­view of some of the clin­i­cal da­ta sug­gest­ing harm: there is a new dis­ease called “smart­phone ad­dic­tion;” teens who spend more than three hours a day on so­cial me­dia face dou­ble the risk of anx­i­ety and de­pres­sion; chil­dren at smart­phone-free schools get GSCE re­sults 1-2 grades high­er; 90 per cent of girls and 50 per cent of boys have been sent un­so­licit­ed ex­plic­it sex­u­al con­tent and 80 per cent of teenage girls have been put un­der pres­sure to pro­vide sex­u­al im­ages of them­selves and strik­ing­ly, 75 per cent of 15 year olds have seen a be­head­ing video.” De­light­ful stuff!

The harm hap­pens every­where, at home, in the bed­room, es­pe­cial­ly at night, in the maxi taxi, on the sports field but es­pe­cial­ly in school rooms. Again, Oc­to­ber 6, “All this helps to ex­plain why sev­er­al coun­tries, led by Aus­tralia, Swe­den, Sin­ga­pore, Japan, South Ko­rea, the Nether­lands, Spain, Fin­land, France, Italy and Den­mark, are scal­ing back dig­i­tal-first ed­u­ca­tion, re­duc­ing com­put­ers, tablets and phones in class­rooms and re­turn­ing to a fo­cus on books and hand­writ­ing.”

Nor­way has just be­come the lat­est coun­try to join the lime. In 2024, it re­versed its decade-long push to­ward dig­i­tal-first class­rooms, af­ter a ten-year pe­ri­od of pro­vid­ing dig­i­tal de­vices and iPads to stu­dents re­vealed sharp de­clines in read­ing scores, vo­cab­u­lary and lit­er­a­cy. As of Au­gust 2026, gen­er­a­tive AI is banned for pri­ma­ry school stu­dents, with strict su­per­vi­sion re­quired for sec­ondary school.

Then there are the re­cent episodes of hack­ing of Eu­rope’s re­frig­er­a­tors and freez­ers, cryp­tocur­ren­cy heists, high-pro­file se­cu­ri­ty flaws af­fect­ing PHP and cloud and da­ta cen­tre fail­ures, as well as the tem­porar­i­ly knock­ing out of bank­ing, air­line and en­ter­prise ser­vices world­wide and the sud­den col­lapse of an on­line bank in Paraguay, leav­ing half the pop­u­la­tion un­able to with­draw their sav­ings.

This is our fu­ture?