Durkheim believed that there was more to anomie than the sense of profound individual dislocation arising out of the changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. He insisted that anomie was characterized by what he called the “malady of infinite aspiration,” a condition arising when there are “no limits to men’s aspirations” because they “no longer know what is possible and what is not, what is just and what is unjust, which claims and expectations are legitimate and which are immoderate.

But even if work offers people a sense of community and belonging, the kinds of communities that Durkheim imagined might coalesce around the workplace have not materialized to the extent he predicted. Indeed, when Durkheim pictured the city of the future as being made up of a mosaic of work-based communities, he hadn’t quite come to grips with the changing nature of employment and work in the industrial era.

The results of this ambitious exercise were first presented to the Club of Rome in private and then published, in 1972, in a book, The Limits to Growth. The conclusions Meadows and his team reached were very different from Keynes’s utopian dream. They were also not what the Club of Rome, nor anyone else for that matter, wanted to hear.

Aggregating the outcomes of the various scenarios they fed into their mainframes showed unequivocally that if there were no significant changes to historical economic and population growth trends—if business continued as usual—then the world would witness a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” within a century. In other words, their data showed that our continued preoccupation with solving the economic problem was the starkest problem facing humankind and that the likeliest outcome if things continued was catastrophe.

The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.

These two features of technology revolutions—their promise to deliver progress and their tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable—are perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence. Since its conception, the development and use of AI has been propelled by tantalizing dreams of modernity and shaped by a narrow elite with the money and influence to bring forth their conception of the technology. That conception is what has led to the exploding social, labor, and environmental costs that are playing out around the world today, particularly, as we’ll see, in many Global South countries, for which the consequences of their dispossession by historical empires still linger in delayed economic development and weaker political institutions. And yet, just like the South Carolina congressman, Silicon Valley has painted the experiences of those being exploited and harmed by the technology as happier because of it.