Techno-Superstition and the Financialization of Human Worth

It is the year 2125, and a student named Brina asks in her history class, “Mrs. Brown, why did the people back in 2025 allow algorithms like the ‘Credit Score’ and ‘Social Engagement Metrics’ to guide their lives?” For people of that time further in the future, it is difficult to understand why society believed in algorithms to optimize all aspects of their daily lives. The 21st century can be seen as the “Age of Optimization,” where human complexity was flattened into digital data points. People in 2125 no longer understand why humans allowed invisible, proprietary systems to measure, rank, and define their value, viewing it as a voluntary surrender of the human spirit to primitive mathematics. This essay argues that early societies in the 21st century mistook quantification for understanding, reducing human worth to algorithmic metrics.

In today’s world, almost every action and decision is tracked for statistical purposes, creating an atmosphere of constant measurement. Purchases, steps taken, online interactions, and workplace productivity are quantified in the name of optimization, while the same data is repurposed to train artificial intelligence systems and predict consumer behavior. These processes operate so seamlessly that they often fade into the background of everyday life, shaping human choices without explicit awareness.

Moreover, prediction algorithms increasingly determine who gets a house, an internship, or even a second date. For instance, automated hiring software has already been shown to downgrade candidates based on proxies such as employment gaps, disproportionately affecting women and minorities. This is similar to asking a machine how much a person's life is worth according to how much it will benefit an enterprise and generate more profits. A similar logic appears in banking systems, where a credit score can determine access to loans based on opaque statistical assumptions. To a future observer, the idea of a machine deciding one’s “trustworthiness” based on shopping history resembles digital divination, or a form of techno-superstition (Rigotti and Fosch-Villaronga, 2024).

Contemporary society often undermines qualitative traits, such as values like empathy, resilience, and creativity, because they are not measurable metrics that can be evaluated in a singular form. Meanwhile, quantitative grades like KPIs or follower counts are replacing what is considered "unmeasurable" and, therefore, not in our total control. In addition, the reason why these phenomena are happening holds a strong correlation with an emerging culture of encouraging the maximization of profits and productivity at any cost by companies, as well as individuals. This consequently leads to the issue of pursuing merely accurate statistics to guide our actions, rather than understanding and considering the factors that cannot be measured using mathematical calculations.

Moreover, “the black box problem” distorts decision-making, as choices that directly impact a person’s life are made by an algorithm that not only the user, but also the operator, has little to no knowledge about. Even though these systems were originally adopted to increase efficiency, consistency, and fairness at scale in complex societies, due to the nature of their internal systems—as happens with most advanced AI technologies—what one might call “organic black boxes” are conceived. The deep learning systems that support these models are so complex that even the developers themselves do not understand exactly what happens inside them (Kosinski, 2024).

This opacity gives rise to what can be described as the anxiety of the “shadow rank,” a psychological state in which individuals feel constantly judged by an unknown entity. This produces a condition in which individuals continuously self-optimize without ever knowing the criteria by which they are judged. From the 2125 perspective, this century might be seen as the "Dark Age of Logic," in which humanity abandoned its own intuition in favor of flawed, biased automation by algorithms programmed in a way that profit and effectiveness are the most important factors to consider when making a decision that could transform someone's life in a positive or negative way.

Hopefully, by 2125, the population will be ahead in terms of separating quantifiable aspects from the intrinsic, unmeasurable values that human life holds, through decoupling survival and status from digital metrics. While people in the current world see these tools as supposed to make life more “efficient”, the future may view them as a tragic misunderstanding of what being “alive” actually means. This system takes apart the spontaneous actions, behaviors, or decisions that define humanity and replaces them with quantifiable, but merely accurate metrics to define the importance of a person. This builds a situation similar to putting a price tag on every person on earth depending on how appealing their data is to an algorithm. Maybe by that time, after several technological revolutions, society will finally return to appreciating the concept of having immeasurable things like feelings and emotions that can help guide us and find the meaning of our lives, beyond purely statistical and mathematical metrics.

The most incomprehensible aspect of the early algorithmic age, then, is not the technology itself, but the belief that a program could ever know enough about a person to make their most important life decisions.

Bibliography

• Kosinski, M. (2024). What is black box artificial intelligence (AI)? [online] IBM. Available at: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/black-box-ai.

• Rigotti, C. and Fosch-Villaronga, E. (2024). Fairness, AI & Recruitment. Computer law and security report/Computer law & security report, [online] 53(1), pp.105966–105966. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2024.105966.