Silicon Valley’s Future Is Soulless – And That’s the Point
David Roth’s CES 2025 piece in Defector exposes Silicon Valley’s empty AI vision—one that replaces human connection with automation and surveillance. Read the full critique.
David Roth’s latest piece for Defector, "The Future Is Too Easy," is a masterclass in cutting through the nonsense of the tech world’s grandest illusions. What begins as a witty travelogue from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas quickly morphs into a devastating critique of Silicon Valley’s hollow vision for our future.
CES, as Roth describes it, is capitalism turned up to 11—a sea of AI-powered gimmicks, useless automation, and corporate doublespeak promising a life of effortless optimization. The Tesla-branded Hyperloop, meant to be a cutting-edge transit solution, instead becomes the perfect metaphor for tech’s misguided ambitions:
"Mass transit made dumb and inefficient through its insistent refusal to honor the concept; a futuristic aesthetic gone janky around the edges, in service of a howling and willful category error."
The show’s defining theme? Handing over every human decision, action, and moment to artificial intelligence—no matter how unready, unnecessary, or unsettling the technology actually is. AI executives, Roth notes, are selling "a grandiose and mystified mixture of awe and dread," promising that AI will soon be “better than humans at almost everything,” while delivering little more than an expensive, half-baked scam.
Take OpenAI’s much-hyped “Operator” assistant, which, when asked to buy groceries, inexplicably searched for milk in Des Moines instead of its user’s actual city. A small failure, maybe, but one emblematic of the wider tech landscape: big promises, laughable execution, and an insatiable appetite for replacing humans with software that barely functions.
A Future Designed to Isolate
But Roth’s essay is about more than just tech’s broken promises. He connects AI’s relentless march to a broader societal shift—one where human interaction, community, and even agency are seen as inefficiencies to be optimized away. His most haunting observation ties it all together:
“The fantasy and utility of AI, for the unconscionably wealthy and relentlessly wary masters of this space, converge in a high and lonesome abstraction—technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription.”
It’s a chilling vision, but maybe it’s one that will finally wake us up. As tech executives push us toward a world of automation, isolation, and surveillance, we should be asking whether we truly want convenience at the cost of connection.
Because what we need—urgently—is leadership that doesn’t see the messiness of human life as a problem to be solved, but as the very thing that makes life worth living.