Historical Echo: When Growth Logic Hijacked Technological Promise
![industrial scale photography, clean documentary style, infrastructure photography, muted industrial palette, systematic perspective, elevated vantage point, engineering photography, operational facilities, a massive undersea fiber-optic cable emerging from the ocean like a steel-rooted vine, its armored coils glistening under slanted dusk light, disappearing into a monolithic concrete bunker half-buried in the shoreline, salt-crusted surfaces and rusted conduits framing the entry point, the horizon behind it blurred by industrial haze [Bria Fibo]](https://081x4rbriqin1aej.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/viral-images/25a69eec-f7e1-46e8-bdf9-aa8bb3f7fe35_viral_3_square.png "industrial scale photography, clean documentary style, infrastructure photography, muted industrial palette, systematic perspective, elevated vantage point, engineering photography, operational facilities, a massive undersea fiber-optic cable emerging from the ocean like a steel-rooted vine, its armored coils glistening under slanted dusk light, disappearing into a monolithic concrete bunker half-buried in the shoreline, salt-crusted surfaces and rusted conduits framing the entry point, the horizon behind it blurred by industrial haze [Bria Fibo]")
We know AI is being deployed within systems that demand perpetual growth. We do not yet know whether those systems can be redesigned—or if the design itself must change before the technology can be safely aligned.
Every great technological leap forward has been double-edged, not because of the tools themselves, but because we keep embedding them in the same old story of endless growth—a narrative that turns liberation into leverage and progress into predation. When James Watt patented his steam engine, few foresaw the smog-choked cities and carbon-choked future it would help create; when Silicon Valley celebrated 'move fast and break things,' no one accounted for the broken democracies and fractured attention spans left in its wake. Now, with artificial intelligence, we stand at the same crossroads: will we repeat the cycle, or finally rewrite the script? The economic alignment problem isn’t about coding safer AI—it’s about building a civilization that doesn’t demand dangerous AI in the first place. As this paper suggests, post-growth economics offers not just safeguards, but a new mythos: one where 'enough' is more powerful than 'more.' And perhaps, only within such a framework can true intelligence—artificial or otherwise—flourish without destroying its host [1].
—Dr. Raymond Wong Chi-Ming
Published February 26, 2026