Humanity has godlike powers when it comes to science but emotionally we’re too lacking to handle our abilities, argues our Writer at Large Neil Mackay

Over the last decade I’ve gone from evangelistic tech-optimism to near-Luddite tech-pessimism.

My love affair with technology began around 1978 with the Atari: the first video game console. Since then, I’ve gathered new gadgetry like a lepidoperist collects butterflies. There’s a cupboard in my study that’s a robot graveyard, filled with wires and motherboards.

Until the mid-2010s, tech was an adjunct to life, not life itself. Tech didn’t dominate existence. Today, without tech you’re delimbed as a functioning member of society. Until the mid-2010s, tech improved life. The cost-benefit analysis was all benefit with little cost. Now, tech is trauma. Tech has you by the throat. It rips society and industry to shreds.

Throughout my decades of tech-optimism, I suppressed one niggling concern: that humans aren’t emotionally equipped to handle our technological prowess. In terms of science, we’re godlike. But in terms of our emotional stability, we’re still chimps.

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Until the mid-2010s, though, I could tamp that worry down. Sure, we’d invented gunpowder and nuclear bombs, but email and the internet were the great democratisers.

Tech had led to some horrific detours in humankind’s story but it was mostly an engine of progress and betterment.

I now view such sunny ideas as idealistic nonsense. Today, I give full-throated voice to my belief that humans are indeed emotionally incapable of dealing with our........

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