This reminds me of the unabomber manifesto. He claimed that 'have a problem to solve' was not the rule, that technology advances for its own end. Humans adapt to changing technology rather than technology advancing to support humans.
Also there’s a fantastic BBC docuseries called “Connections” by James Burke that makes the case that nothing in tech could have happened sooner or later than it did, and that each progression was an inevitable next step from the previous. It has interesting implications.
I just thought the parallel was particularly insidious in the context of AI.
To GP's point, the idea of technology evolving for its own end is thought provoking and perhaps a little scary /because/ it does have historical basis, if for no other reason than for war, the ongoing constant of historical life. I guess it's most thought provoking to me because I want deeply to believe in the enlightenment, which seems diametrically opposed to the idea of technology evolving for its own end. But it's hard to convince myself of the realism of intrinsic technoprogressivism. It seems to me that progressivism in technological development must be very deliberately crafted and diplomatically achieved through global pacts between many nations and the will of their people.
It's not as much technology developing for its own ends, but rather things happening when conditions are ripe.
I haven't studied the period well enough to have a strong opinion here, but my current feeling is that enlightenment became inevitable once the printing press spread around the world - giving many more people access to knowledge and opinions, allowing many more people to broadcast their views, and do it much faster and more thoroughly than secular and religious establishment could ever hope to suppress.
This isn't to take away the achievement of individuals coming up with ideas we now consider important - it's more of a recognition that those ideas are products of their times, that there were people in the past with the same ideas, but they didn't spread because conditions weren't right.
This is a similar take to explaining why scientific breakthroughs were usually made by many people, independently, at roughly the same time: that's because the limiting factor of progress isn't individual genius, but the conditions - existing scientific body work, economics, technology for testing and measuring. Once conditions are right to enable the next incremental step, it pretty much immediately gets made by multiple geniuses around the world.
I suppose this is half of the truth. The way I see it, it's a feedback loop: people develop technology for reasons, technology ends up transforming societies well beyond predictions or intentions of the inventors, which leads to new problems requiring new technologies, ... rinse repeat.
My current belief is that something I heard labeled as "technological determinism" holds at the high level: culture is primarily driven by economic incentives, like water flowing down and around a landscape; development of technology is one of the primary ways this landscape changes. Technology and economics are in tight feedback loop. Culture just follows, perhaps occasionally influencing the economics/technology feedback loop.
I'm not holding that belief strongly. It's just that so far, I've seen plenty of evidence for it - i.e. social transformations that were inevitable given the economical and technological landscape, and human nature - while I can't think of a single case of social progress that was independent of the economics, and solely conditioned on critical mass of people making an ethics-driven decision.