The ‘World of Tomorrow’ would be sleek, clean, streamlined and, as far as I could tell, without a trace of poor people.

Eradicating poverty is a recurring theme in tech spaces and is often used as justification for developing and deploying controversial technological advancements. Recently, we’ve seen it with things like cryptocurrencies, virtual reality and LLMs & gen AI. Billions of dollars are poured into these ventures because they will (supposedly) bring about fairness and reduce the burden of poverty. There are all these pronouncements that people will have access to money, information, community, etc. They tell us that governments and big business won’t be able to interfere and keep the majority out anymore, even as the heralds themselves are the titans of billion (and perhaps trillion) dollar enterprises.

The idea that poverty exists because of a lack of technology is an interesting one. I could see how the case could be made that technological advancements increase the quality of life, but it seems the issue of poverty is a social one. It’s the result of an uneven distribution of resources, a social issue. If it wasn’t, we’d all have a generally even status of life and there wouldn’t be a word for a group of people experiencing a lack of access to basic necessities because we’d all be experiencing such a thing.

At some point, we have to sit back and ask ourselves why we keep falling for the trap of technological advancement as a prerequisite for utopia. The same playbook is used again and again to justify why we need to give resources such as land and capital to (mostly) men whose inventions will usher us into a future prosperity. What happened if we gave those dollars to people who are struggling now?

Sagan went to the World of Tomorrow fair in 1939. We are 87 years in the future, and we still believe that tech will save us. When will we get over our delusion? Is it fundamental to who we are?