The Cult of Technology: From Railroads to AI

Video Description

Go to https://piavpn.com/seanmunger to get 83% off from our sponsor Private Internet Access with 4 months free! Since the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, society has generally had a profound faith in the positive transformative power of technology. However, the historical record shows that faith may not be justified. In this video we’ll look at numerous examples, from the building of the railroads in the 19th century to the present artificial intelligence bubble, of times when the costs and downsides of technology were ignored or minimized, usually with disastrous results. Sources for this video included: Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition (London: The Athlone Press, 2002); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011); Wyn Craig Wade, The Titanic: End of a Dream (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Julia Shapero, “Director James Cameron Struck by Similarities Between Titan Implosion, Titanic Sinking,” TheHill.com, June 22, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20230622213031/https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4063382-director-james-cameron-struck-by-similarities-between-titan-implosion-titanic-sinking/; Paul R. Josephson, “‘Projects of the Century’ in Soviet History: Large-Scale Technologies from Lenin to Gorbachev,” Technology and Culture, Vol. 36, No. 3 (July 1995), 519-559; Garrett M. Graff, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making & Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2025); Keir Martin, “Robert McNamara and the limits of ‘bean counting,’” Anthropology Today, Vol. 26, No. 3 (June 2010), 16-19; Dave Young, “Computing War Narratives: The Hamlet Evaluation System in Vietnam,” Machine Research Ph.D. Workshop, Aarhus University Participatory IT Research Centre, published on Machine Research (blog), October 2016, https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/dave-young/; HES System, Text of Ambassador Komer’s News Conference on the Hamlet Evaluation System, 2234306047, December 1, 1967, Box 43, Folder 06, Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 03 - Statistical Data, Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=2234306047; James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” The New York Times, Aug. 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html; John Cassidy, Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (New York: HarperCollins, 2002); Michael Lewis, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009); David Gerard, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain (London: David Gerard, 2017); Benjamin Wallace, “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin,” Wired, November 23, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-bitcoin/; Brandon Vigliarolo, “95% of NFTS now totally worthless, say researchers,” The Register, September 21, 2023, https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/21/95_percent_nfts_worthless/; Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, Timnit Gebru et al., “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”, FAccT ’21 Virtual Event, Canada (March 2021), https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922; Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (New York: Penguin Press, 2025); Timnit Gebru & Émile Torres, “The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenisc and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence,” First Monday, Vol. 29, No. 4 (March 2024), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13636/11606; Aditya Challapally, Chris Pease, Ramesh Raskar et al., “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025,” MIT Nanda, July 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250818145714mp_/https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf; Numerous articles by Edward Zitron, https://www.wheresyoured.at/ My book, “The Gangster Crown”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPJF8HZX My book, “Daniel Vanished”: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYWTRDKF My website: https://www.seanmunger.com My Ko-fi: https://Ko-fi.com/seanmunger My blog: https://gardenofmemory.net/ Chapters: 00:00-12:03: The Great Exhibition 12:03-24:03: Progress! 24:03-37:15: The Railroads, Part I 37:15-48:23: The Railroads, Part II 48:23-59:26: The Titanic 59:26-1:12:31: The Great War 1:12:31-1:23:27: Bolshevik Tech 1:23:27-1:35:31: Atoms For War and Peace 1:35:31-1:48:15: Vietnam & The Moon 1:48:15-2:01:18: The Greenhouse Problem 2:01:18-2:16:11: The Dot Bomb 2:16:11-2:31:23: Play Money 2:31:23-2:47:11: The AI Bubble, Part I 2:47:11-2:56:59: The AI Bubble, Part II 2:56:59-3:03:56: Conclusion