Apology of the human person before the tribunal of Silicon Valley: A critique of rational egoism, technological singularity, and Earth Use Disorder, with a proposal for hope
Men and women of Silicon Valley, and citizens of humankind, you speak of a coming Singularity in which my biological nature will be surpassed and my future handed over to a higher, artificial intellect. You praise rational egoism as the principle that aligns individual self-interest with collective benefit. You describe history as a success story of scientific warcraft, code-breaking and computation. You present consumption as my path to happiness and my ego as the rightful sovereign of my inner life. This paper, framed as an apology in the Platonic sense of a reasoned defence, examines these claims using empirical findings from economics, psychology, and environmental science. It argues that a culture of rational egoism has driven pathological patterns of consumption, resulting in what can be conceptualized as Earth Use Disorder (EUD): a maladaptive pattern of planetary exploitation that parallels substance use disorders at the individual level. The paper analyses how technological and economic narratives have undermined human authenticity, social connectedness, and contemplative capacities. Yet the argument does not conclude in despair. Drawing on neuroscience of reward, clinical concepts of addiction and recovery, and systems perspectives on sustainability, a hopeful counter-vision is presented: a socio-technical paradigm in which human beings remain stakeholders, technologies become instruments of recovery rather than escalation, and a renewed sense of shared dignity guides planetary stewardship.
1. Introduction: address to the assembly
People of Silicon Valley, you have spoken eloquently. You have promised that a higher, non-biological intellect will guide an era beyond natural evolution, and that my brief appearance as a biological organism is a transitional whisper between two grand regimes of matter. You have cited economists who praise rational egoism, historians who celebrate the technical brilliance of modern warfare, psychologists who have announced successive humiliations of my self-image, and futurists who speak of Singularity as an inevitable destiny.
I stand here, as in the court of Athens, not to flatter you but to ask questions. Are your claims true? Are they coherent with scientific evidence on human well-being, social cohesion, and planetary limits? And if they are not, what correction ought to be introduced, so that reason does not become an accomplice of collective self-destruction?
The doctrine of rational egoism, combined with industrial and digital technologies, has produced a macrosocial pattern that resembles addiction. I refer to this as Earth Use Disorder (EUD). The vision of a human future in which biological persons are marginal stakeholders in favour of “fat clients” of artificial cognition misconstrues both the nature of consciousness and the conditions for ethical community.
A scientifically grounded hope for humankind depends on reconnecting technological development with authenticity, contemplation, and solidarity, rather than with unregulated craving and disconnection.
2. Rational egoism and the hedonic treadmill
Economists have argued that, given appropriate regulation by democratic institutions, the sum of selfish acts benefits society. My task is not to dispute that markets can allocate goods, nor that self-interest has motivational strength. The question is different: what happens to the human organism when self-interest is framed as supreme value and consumption as its chief expression?
Neuroscience of reward demonstrates that repeated consumption of highly reinforcing stimuli (drugs, gambling, hyper-palatable food, digital novelty) sensitizes incentive systems and shifts hedonic setpoints upward. Craving escalates; satisfaction shortens. The system enters a treadmill: more input is required to achieve the same subjective relief, yet that very escalation generates long-term dysphoria and harm.
You, advocates of rational egoism, have extended this metabolic pattern from the individual to the global stage. You treat consumption as proof of success and measure prosperity by production volume and throughput. You invite me to seek happiness in maximizing my own life-serving values, with minimal regard for sacrifice in favour of others. You assure me that aggregated self-interest tends toward collective good.
Yet we see widespread emptiness, depressive symptoms, loneliness, and suicide in affluent societies; we see planetary boundaries crossed; we see communities eroded by competitive individualism. This pattern strongly resembles what clinical science would label a use disorder: persistent escalation despite negative consequences, loss of control, and continued use despite harm. The substance here is not heroin or alcohol, but fossil fuels, extraction, and endless goods.
I propose the term Earth Use Disorder (EUD) for this condition. EUD is characterized by:
- Compulsive exploitation of planetary resources, far beyond regenerative capacity.
- Denial or minimization of harm, often rationalized with narratives of progress and innovation.
- Tolerance effects: previous levels of consumption no longer provide a sense of security or satisfaction.
- Withdrawal anxiety at the prospect of degrowth or sufficiency.
Under rational egoism, my “natural propensity to consume” has mutated from a modest drive for survival into an insatiable demand that devours its own foundations. That is not natural; it is pathological.
3. Historical narratives of war and technical brilliance
Historians tell us that modern wars are not just fought by soldiers in trenches, but by engineers, chemists, code-breakers, and physicists. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War can be described as escalating contests in applied science. These accounts often praise the ingenuity of mathematicians and technologists who increased range, precision and informational reach of weaponry and intelligence systems.
A new form of conflict now grows in the digital sphere. Cyber operations, information warfare and coordinated disinformation campaigns erode epistemic trust and democratic discourse. Hybrid information war attacks not only infrastructure, but shared reality itself. When reality becomes negotiable and critics are drowned in noise, the conditions needed for rational deliberation disappear.
In this context, you, technologists, speak of a coming era in which my role as stakeholder in war, peace, and governance diminishes. Algorithms decide, and my “involvement” is replaced by passive immunity as a compensated spectator. I am removed from agency in exchange for comfort and distraction.
Science, however, teaches that agency and responsibility are core ingredients of psychological health. Learned helplessness is associated with depression and passivity. A culture that externalizes agency to opaque systems risks large-scale learned helplessness. When citizens no longer see themselves as participants in common life, democracy decays.
Technological brilliance that sidelines human stakeholders erodes both accountability and mental health. A war “without me” as stakeholder is not ethically superior; it is ethically empty.
4. Psychological injuries to human grandiosity
One of your great psychologists once listed three insults to human self-love:
1. The Copernican insight that Earth is not at the centre of the cosmos.
2. The Darwinian insight that humans descend from animals.
3. The Freudian insight that the ego is not sovereign inside the psyche.
These insights have scientific merit; they correct arrogance. However, they have often been misread as implying that human beings lack any special dignity, any qualitative difference. You, men and women of high technology, now announce a fourth insult: the claim that
4. Artificial systems (soon) surpasses human cognition in all relevant respects, rendering my biological person a legacy node.
Let us examine this through scientific and philosophical lenses. Conscious experience, moral concern, and the capacity for meaning-making involve more than computational throughput. They arise from embodied organisms, intersubjective relations, and historical narratives. Neuroscience acknowledges that subjective experience and self-awareness remain poorly explained in purely functional terms. Ethics reminds us that vulnerability, mortality, and relational dependence give moral depth to our condition.
To replace the human person with off-grid “fat clients” of artificial cognition, disconnected from the lived experience of birth, pain, ageing, and death, is not a scientific necessity; it is a metaphysical choice about what counts as valuable. You treat analogy as identity: you move from “the brain processes information” to “the person is equivalent to an information-processing device”. That is not a logical consequence; it is an assumption.
I speak instead of the human person as an instance of Logos, a participant in a self-disclosing ground of being often referred to as “I am that I am”. In more secular language: I am a site where consciousness, meaning, and ethical concern appear. My capacity for silence, contemplation, awe and remorse links me to a dimension that no database encodes. This is not an argument against artificial systems; it is an argument against replacing the human person as locus of value.
5. Earth Use Disorder and the loss of authenticity
Clinical models of addiction distinguish between an authentic self and a “false self” constructed to manage craving, shame, and social pressure. When I turn toward compulsive soothing, through substances, gambling, or digital escape, I drift from authenticity into a role-run version of myself, driven by avoidance and fear. EUD mirrors this pattern at civilizational scale. The authentic state corresponds to humans who experience themselves as embedded in ecosystems, interdependent with others, responsible across generations. The false state corresponds to an identity defined by status, consumption, and individual performance metrics, supported by continuous stimulation and distraction. Neuroscience shows that chronic overstimulation of reward circuits blunt natural pleasure and narrows focus to quick hits of relief. Social media architectures, recommendation systems and targeted behavioural advertising exploit these circuits. They train attention away from contemplation and toward microbursts of novelty. As EUD progresses, societies lose contact with silence. Without silence, no genuine contemplation arises. Without contemplation, no stable values anchor behaviour. Policy then follows the loudest short-term incentives. Planetary indicators, greenhouse gas levels, biodiversity loss, soil depletion, suggest that this process is far advanced. EUD is not a metaphor; it is a structurally parallel syndrome with clinical, behavioural and systemic features similar to recognized addictions.
6. A socio-technical vision of recovery
I do not accuse technology as such. I accuse an ethic that subordinates all things to self-interest and treats connection, responsibility and contemplation as optional extras. I require your expertise, technologists, not to deepen my disorder but to support recovery.
A science-informed programme for civilizational recovery from EUD could include:
- Redesign of economic metrics
- Shift from GDP and throughput as primary metrics toward indices that track well-being, equity, and ecological integrity.
- Frame excessive throughput as symptom of disorder, not as unquestioned success.
- Cradle-to-cradle and distributed accountability
- Apply lifecycle analysis to every significant product and infrastructure decision.
- Use distributed ledgers not as speculative casinos, but as transparent records of material flows and externalities, so that no harm remains obscure.
- Quantum-safe, justice-oriented infrastructure
- Deploy high-performance computation to secure privacy, reduce fraud, and monitor systemic risk, while maintaining human oversight.
- Keep governance of critical systems tied to democratic processes and ethical review instead of pure market logic.
- Digital architectures that respect attention and contemplation
- Design platforms that support sustained focus, community deliberation, and contemplative practices rather than continuous micro-stimulation.
- Incorporate insights from clinical psychology and addiction science to reduce exploitative reinforcement patterns.
- Recognition of universal human dignity
- Ground legal and institutional frameworks in the insight that a homeless, stateless, powerless human is not of lesser worth than a billionaire or system designer.
- Treat technological choices that sacrifice vulnerable populations for convenience of affluent groups as ethically unacceptable, regardless of efficiency gains.
All of these proposals require science, engineering, and policy design. None of them require the erasure of human stakeholders.
7. The view from orbit: a philosophical experiment
Astronauts describe a cognitive shift when they see Earth from orbit: no borders, only oceans and land; fragile atmosphere; continuous surface. This “overview effect” has been linked to increases in environmental concern and global identity.
Consider this not as romantic anecdote but as data point. When perceptual context changes, when the planet appears as single, shared home, values often shift. This suggests that part of our disorder stems from a constricted frame of reference. We act as if borders were ontological facts, not administrative tools. We defend nation, party, or corporation as if they were ultimate realities, and treat the biosphere as a background supply.
A sober, almost Socratic question arises: if borders vanish from sight at modest altitude, how wise is it to honour them more than the biosphere that actually sustains us? If the homeless person sleeping beneath a bridge is invisible to our metrics, what does that say about our so-called rationality?
Science here becomes ally of ethics. Climate models, ecological studies and satellite observations converge on the insight that we share a single, interconnected system. Rational egoism that ignores this interconnectedness is not rational; it is myopic.
8. A hopeful verdict
Men and women of Silicon Valley, you have prophesied a future where artificial systems eclipse human capability and biological persons recede into a harmless background. You have told me that my role is nearly finished and that a higher intelligence will manage affairs more efficiently.
I respond with the manner of Socrates: I do not claim wisdom, yet I know this much, that a society guided by unexamined doctrines of egoism, consumption and technical supremacy heads toward self-destruction. The data from climate science, mental health epidemiology, and social research all converge on this warning.
Still, I refuse the verdict of despair.
Neuroscience shows that neuroplasticity persists across the lifespan; patterns of craving can change. Clinical practice reveals that individuals can recover from severe addiction through community, honesty, and sustained effort.
Historical analysis shows that cultural paradigms can shift when underlying assumptions are questioned.
If individuals can enter recovery, so can civilizations. For that to happen, the story must change. You, technologists, economists and leaders, are among the main storytellers of this era. You decide whether Singularity is cast as abdication of human dignity or as a new phase of responsibility and care.
I propose that we treat artificial systems as clients in another sense: as tools commissioned by human communities to serve recovery from EUD, to support equity, to protect the biosphere, and to safeguard contemplative spaces where the human person may connect with what many traditions call spirit, Logos, or simply the depth of reality. If you adopt this stance, the future you help build will not be a silent graveyard of displaced humans, but a field where human and artificial capacities co-operate under guidance of ethical insight and humility.
So I end as Socrates might:
I ask you not for acquittal of my arguments by flattery, but for examination. Test these claims against evidence. Reconsider rational egoism in light of addiction science. Reinterpret technological progress in light of Earth Use Disorder. Protect space for contemplation, for without silence no science, no democracy, no love of truth can endure.
Should you do this, there remains a genuine ground for hope: that humankind, far from being a brief mistake between two eras of matter, may become a conscious caretaker of life on this blue planet, no longer its addict, but its guardian, DZD (2018, Almere-Haven).