The Abundance Story Is True
Technology has produced extraordinary abundance. Life expectancy rose. Poverty fell. Food became more reliable. Medicine advanced. Communication became instant. Travel, heating, lighting, sanitation, and knowledge access improved beyond what most earlier generations could imagine.
That story should be told with gratitude. A serious critique of modern technology should not pretend the benefits are fake.
The Fruitfulness Question
But abundance is not the same as fruitfulness. A technology can increase output while weakening the interior life. It can make a person more entertained but less peaceful, more informed but less wise, more connected but less faithful, more stimulated but less self-controlled.
Our fruitfulness research uses the biblical fruit of the Spirit as one frame for asking an older question: what kind of people do our tools help us become?
Technology fruitfulness and deception trend
Rolling average composite fruitfulness and deception scores across major technologies.
The Inflection
The study's core claim is that many older technologies acted primarily on the external world: plows, sanitation, vaccines, printing, electricity, transportation, and medical tools. They could be misused, but their ordinary function often reduced suffering or expanded human capability.
Many recent consumer technologies act more directly on attention, desire, identity, comparison, and trust. That does not make them useless. It makes them more morally intimate.
Measure What Matters
A society that measures only growth will get growth, even when growth comes with hidden costs. We also need ways to ask whether people are becoming more capable of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Those words may sound old. That is part of their strength. They name goods that every serious technology should serve, not consume.