It’s no secret that I’m directionally challenged. On the SEPTA, on campus, and on streets I’ve walked a hundred times, I am always staring at Google Maps, watching a line of blue dots tell me where to go. And somehow, I still miss turns. I end up somewhere close to where I’m supposed to be, only to realize that I’m on the wrong side of the street, or that I’m still a couple of minutes off from my true destination.
Honestly, it’s fascinating that I’ve never needed to get better at navigating. With technology, I am always corrected before I face any real consequences—a robotic voice tells me I’m going the wrong way, or a recalculated path shows up on my phone unprompted. Technology has made it possible for someone like me to move through the world without ever fully learning how to do it myself. I may be lost sometimes, but I’m never lost enough for it to matter.
Our daily lives have been shaped and reshaped by technology since its invention, and this has only become more pronounced with the rise of artificial intelligence. What once took five hours now takes five minutes. What once required patience, time, and tolerance for being bad at something is now just a quick ChatGPT prompt away. We have outsourced our struggles so seamlessly and frequently that it has become an unconscious habit we can no longer get rid of.
But what we haven’t fully registered is what we’ve given up in the process. The Tech Issue explores the consequences of living in a world where technology renders struggle optional. What happens when we outsource patient care to a machine that cannot make any moral judgments? What happens when we replace real actors with AI–generated ones? What happens when we outsource creative judgment to a platform that can process thousands of scripts, but only gravitates toward the ones that have already worked and cannot filter out the strange, uniquely good ones?
These are not hypothetical questions. These are questions we are encountering in our lives, right now. The new technologies being built every day are less inventions than they are mirrors, reflecting back the fears, desires, and unresolved questions that we’ve always had. People never would’ve created Google Maps or the GPS if there was no one getting lost. They would not have built any of it if people were not already struggling and searching for a way through.
The landscape of technology has shifted faster than any of us have been able to keep up with. These pages are an attempt to think about that shift, and to think about what becomes of us when we begin handing more and more of ourselves over to technology.
It’s one thing to let a GPS correct a wrong turn, and another to expect every human difficulty to be corrected just as quickly.
