Of course Facebook and Google want to 'solve' social problems. They're hungry for our data Nathalie Olah

We hear it said all the time, most recently in a national campaign for BT: "Technology will save us." The slogan was plastered on billboards across the country as part of BT's new advertising campaign, linked to a "UK-wide digital skills movement" developed partly with Google. The sentiment is so ubiquitous that it even led to a dispute with a startup of a similar name. But in an era dominated by the "big four" (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) the idea that tech will save us rings hollow, an example of utopian messaging being used to conceal the simple pursuit of profit. Having proposed solutions to everything from food shortages to suicide prevention to climate breakdown, companies such as Google and Facebook – two of the leading western companies in the artificial intelligence arms race – claim there's almost nothing that cannot be tackled through tech.