Tech for Life
A manifesto
“We should not accept technology that deadens us”
- Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology
Introduction
Whatever you are, even on your worst day, you are not a machine.
Nor are you a computer, an algorithm, or a “meat robot”. You are not merely a pattern of entropy displacement. And your life is most certainly not a simulation.
You are none of these things, because you are something vastly more complex, mysterious, and wonderful: you are alive.
As a living being, you have desires, and a drive to make those desires real. Your imagination transforms reality into the symbols and stories that define your world. With every action you take, you inject meaning and purpose into the universe.
And yet, we live in a world where technology is often presented as a superior form of being. Technology seduces us with promises of overcoming all human frailties. It offers the allure of security, safety, and control. It dangles the possibility of perfecting every human skill, of automating away our weaknesses, of achieving a digital immortality.
But these promises never quite seem to materialize. In fact, the more we embrace technology, the further we seem to get away from the essence of what makes us human. We become detached from our sense of place and history. We find ourselves more isolated and alone, despite being more connected than ever. We are starved for purpose and meaning in a world flooding us with data and information.
Instead of masters of our technological destiny, we feel like cogs in a digital machine. Instead of technology enhancing our human-ness, it seems to reduce us to mere resources. We are the training data for algorithms, the content providers for recommender engines, the behavioral profiles for advertisers.
And now we’re on the cusp of wielding unprecedented technological power. Synthetic biology, planetary-scale geoengineering, and artificial superintelligence will dramatically transform our world. But how confident are we that these powers will lead to a future of human flourishing?
Just as our technological power is increasing, our wisdom to deploy that power seems to be decreasing. While technology keeps expanding what we can do, our grasp on what we ought to do has not kept pace.
In all of our excitement for technological progress, we seem to forget that technology is not an end unto itself. Technology does not exist for its own sake. It can’t tell us what technology is actually for. It can’t make our choices for us.
Only something bigger than technology can do that.
This manifesto proposes that only life itself is capable of being that “bigger something” that can wisely steward these emerging technological powers.
By situating technology within the larger story of life, we can unite technology around a singular purpose, and align technology with what life needs to flourish.
This is to reimagine technology not as our replacement, but as our extension—an amplifier of our deepest human drives to preserve everything life has achieved while expanding what life can be and become.
This is a call to put technology in service of life itself.
A world out of whack
We can start by better understanding our technological situation.
Technology is the product of our imagination. It’s no different than philosophy, science, art, culture, politics, and every other aspect of the human world that we have imagined into being.
For almost all of human history, these imaginative powers have operated in unison. Guided by larger purposes, they have always acted more as a whole than as individual parts.
Tracking the impact of their power over time would look something like this:
Even as each dimension ebbed and flowed, their power largely increased at the same trajectory to propel the evolution of human civilization forward.
But today, the graph looks different. Starting sometime during the industrial revolution, the impact from technology began to increase exponentially. The other dimensions of our imagination started to stagnate by comparison.
Now the graph looks more like this:
By achieving increasing powers of causality, technology is escaping the powers of choice that our imaginations were once capable of imposing. Rather than a single part of a greater whole, technology is now operating more like an autonomous force, unconstrained by anything bigger than itself.
The result is a world that feels increasingly out of whack.
What does a world out of balance feel like?
It feels like technology dominates our reality, swallowing up every other dimension of our human experience. Everything else feels small and inconsequential by comparison.
We feel this imbalance when we consider our future. Technology feels like the only thing that will matter. We don't imagine dramatic improvements in human coordination or upgrades to our collective intelligence. Instead, our future seems to hinge solely on what new technological powers will emerge and who will control them.
We feel this imbalance when every technological “choice” feels more like a technological demand. Technology sets the terms of engagement for almost every aspect of our lives. To opt out of technology today is to effectively opt out of the economy, governance, and almost all of society. It’s simply not an option.
We feel this imbalance when a technological attitude seems to pervade every aspect of our existence. Is there any part of the human experience—our childhoods, our relationships, our education, our sex—that we are not trying to replace with screens? That we are not trying to virtualize?
We feel this imbalance when the only motivations that drive innovation seem to be the greed of the market (to make the most money) or the fear of the state (to amass the most power). Any technology that can’t justify huge profit margins or asymmetric power has no incentive to develop, regardless of their potential benefits to humanity or life as a whole.
We feel this imbalance when technological momentum seems unstoppable. Technology has become too complicated to understand, too critical to turn off, and too entrenched to displace. Even when technology creates new problems, the only solution seems to be even more technology.
We feel this imbalance when the technological view increasingly sees human beings as flawed machines meant to be optimized. We're told that machines don't decay, don't show bias, don't make mistakes—and so we should strive to be more like them, augmenting or replacing our humanity with artificial alternatives.
Our world feels less and less like one where the point of technology is to serve humanity. It feels more and more like one where human beings are supposed to serve technology.
Is technology the problem?
But wait—is technology itself the reason for this imbalance? Or is it simply that technology has been wildly successful while everything else has failed to keep up?
Why should we blame technology as if it is some independent force? Our technology is perhaps the greatest testament to the human imagination that we have ever achieved. In just a few millennia, our species has gone from puny upright hominids to a planetary force, all thanks to the results of our technological imagination.
If we really need something to blame, shouldn’t we look at every other aspect of our imaginations? After all, the power of our technology only becomes a problem when nothing else is big enough to properly guide it.
In fact, just as technology is gaining the potential to unlock new levels of human flourishing, traditional forms of balance and wisdom seem to be moving in the opposite direction:
What’s left simply isn’t big enough or wise enough to grapple with our most advanced technologies:
Markets aren’t big enough. Advanced technology is too powerful for the market’s crude trial-and-error mechanisms, and the risk of externalities is too great to leave to the arms-race dynamics that markets demand.
Governments aren’t big enough. Nation states have their own arms-race dynamics that prevent planetary scale coordination, and a single world government is as frightening as any advanced technology.
Philosophy and religions aren’t big enough. In a globally interconnected world, we’re simply too pluralistic to impose a single religion or philosophy on all technological guidance.
Culture and politics aren’t big enough. Today both culture and politics are too fragmented to coherently guide technology. They are more likely to grind innovation to a halt as technology gets swallowed in the culture wars or politicized regulation.
The status quo isn’t big enough. The default hope is that somehow, between big tech and government regulation, we will continue to “muddle through” and “find the equilibrium”. This approach may work when the stakes of technology are localized and marginal. When the stakes turn planetary and existential, we need better ideas.
Which of these do we trust to coordinate AI alignment? To prevent us from crossing planetary boundaries? To guide our pursuit of synthetic biology? To provide sufficient wisdom around “merging with the machine”?
To find something bigger than technology—something capable of uniting a global humanity in guiding our technological future—we’ll have to go much deeper into our existence and much further back in time.
We’ll have to go back to life itself.
Life itself
Life is the one thing that unites each and every one of us: we are each living creatures and we’d each like to continue being so. We’d each like for Earth, our living home, to thrive. And we’d each like the lives of our children to be better than our own.
In this way, life is the one thing that we can all agree on. It can transcend philosophy, politics, religion, and culture. Life is bigger than all of those things.
In a world where advanced technology has put us on the precipice of both transcendent benefits and catastrophic risks, it’s worth asking: what would it look like to reorient technology towards life? To explicitly put technology in service of life itself?
What would this even mean?
The story of life
Life isn’t just the story of human beings here on earth; it’s much bigger than that. Science has no clear definition for what life is, so let’s use the grandest definition possible, one that goes all the way back to the Big Bang—life is that universal drive towards increasing wholeness, structure, and integrity.
Whatever drove those first atoms to coalesce into molecules, and gasses into planets, and planets into galaxies—that same impulse is what drove chemical bonds to evolve into cells and tissues and consciousness and magnificently complex ecosystems of interdependent organisms and eventually you—that is the impulse of life.
We don’t know why or how life happened; we just know that it did happen. And as far as we can tell, the emergence of life has happened only once. This makes life the most precious thing in the entire universe.
This also makes Earth the most interesting planet in the universe. Earth alone has somehow harbored the conditions necessary for life to evolve into the most advanced form that has ever existed: us, human beings.
Humanity’s calling as stewards of life
As the most rare and valuable thing in the universe, life deserves our deepest care and attention. We have no reason to believe that life is somehow destined to continue. As life’s most powerful agents, we have a responsibility to contribute in whatever ways we can to perpetuate life’s continued evolution and expansion.
Our science and technology have given us the powers of evolutionary agents. We contain the potential to upgrade evolution from a purely natural process to a more conscious, intentional process.
As such, any duty of humanity must recognize the need to become worthy stewards of life. To actively steward life is to ensure that life can flourish and expand, both here on Earth and beyond.
We could call this our foundational duty—to both protect what life has achieved and expand what life can become. To fail at this duty would preclude the possibility of any other duties.
This duty comes with the power to evolve what evolution can achieve, and thus what life can become. To have any chance to succeed, we must first obtain the wisdom to deploy such power.
Right Relationship
By reorienting technology towards life, we can begin to see how nature, humanity, and technology can be placed into a right relationship:
Nature as the foundation of life. Nature is the foundation of life, and provides fundamental constraints on what life can be and become. Without nature life ceases to exist.
Humanity as the steward of life. Humanity’s role is to properly value life by working to preserve what life has achieved and expand what life can become.
Technology as the extension of life. Technology is the means by which humanity can fulfill its role as life’s steward, by both protecting Nature as the foundation of life and expanding the limits of life’s possibilities.
We now have an answer for what technology is actually for: to empower humanity to best fulfill its role in expanding life’s integrity and possibility.
In this way, technology can help expand life beyond the pure contingency of its historical path to something more conscious and intentional. All of life’s random twists and turns have led to the capacity to transform evolution itself, to expand possibilities of what life is capable of achieving.
Principles of life
To reorient technology towards life involves two critical steps:
First we must understand the principles that have helped life emerge and flourish.
Then we must translate those principles into practices that can actively guide our technology.
The principles of life can lead to practices that are both generative and surprising.
For example, consider adaptation, the core principle of navigating between the drives of creation and protection to maximize life’s adaptive capacity.
On the one hand, life wants to evolve. Life wants to explore every possible niche until the possibility space is saturated. The goal is creation—to generate and test “new information”. The processes are unpredictable, experimental, and diversifying.
On the other hand, life wants to persist. Much of life’s adaptive mechanisms are meant to replicate and maintain what works. The goal is protection—to conserve the most successful experiments that have proven to work. The processes are predictable, convergent, and unifying.
Adaptation is about finding the right balance between the two. Too much creation threatens life’s ability to persist, while too much protection threatens life’s ability to evolve.
It may seem like technology is only about innovation, but the exact same principle applies. The more confident we are in protecting what we ultimately value, the more experimental we can be in pursuing innovation.
Reorienting more of our technology practices around this principle alone would radically improve our technological landscape.
A future worth living for
What would a world where technology is in service to life look like? Would it really be any different?
In many ways, it would feel the same. After all, any world that deviates too far from the principles of life would simply cease to exist.
But in many ways, it would be very different.
It would be a world where technology is clearly in service to something bigger than itself, guided with meaning and purpose, grounded in a right relationship to humanity, nature, and life itself. It would be a world of technology in love.
Technology in love with humanity
Imagine technology so in love with humanity that it seeks to enhance our human-ness, rather than replace it or automate it away. Technology would get out of our way rather than constantly demand our attention. It would enrich our embodied experiences rather than virtualize them.
This would be a world where maximizing human imagination is a primary focus of innovation. Rather than hoping AI can solve our planetary problems, we’d be probing the limits of our collective intelligence, progressing our human institutions, and expanding our capacity to coordinate at ever increasing scales.
Technology in love with nature
Imagine technology so in love with nature that technological progress is measured by nature’s health and resilience. This would be technology that gives to nature more than it takes; that sees nature as a beneficiary to improve more than a resource to exploit.
This would be a world where technology helps us coexist with other forms of life, rather than further separating us from the natural world. It would help reveal the radical interdependence of our natural world, and how everything we value depends on it.
Technology in love with life
Imagine technology so in love with life that its purpose is clear: to win the infinite game of life, where the only goal is to keep playing.
Rather than top-down plans or utopian outcomes, it would focus on systems and networks that maximize infinite play—where the best experiment is to keep the experiment going.
This would be a world where technology would deeply conserve life’s best experiments so it can run billions of greater experiments. Where innovation is focused on improving our methods for adopting technology as much as it is on improving technology itself.
Imagine being so confident in our ability to test advanced technologies—to measure impacts, run experiments, correct for errors—that we gleefully maximize every innovation to learn what works as quickly as possible so it can be available for everyone.
None of this will be easy
Of course, discerning the principles of life won’t be easy. Our biases and fears will always threaten to corrupt our conclusions. The resulting practices will conflict with traditional goals and principles. We’ll make philosophical, religious, and economic objections.
But it will also not be impossible. Rather than getting lost in politics, culture, and religion, any debates will be grounded in deep agreement—in the values of life itself, and the need to both protect and expand it. This alone could dramatically improve the technological discourse.
We can easily dismiss some traditional hangups, like the natural fallacy—that all things natural are by definition good. The entire idea is that nothing in nature is eternally good because evolution itself is constantly evolving. The principles of life are bigger than any single moment in nature’s history.
For example, natural evolution had to rely on mass pain and death—the crudest tools at its disposal—to bootstrap life through countless iterations of random experiments. But the broader principle isn’t about pain and death, it’s about variation and selection.
As stewards of life, our role is to seek practices that best implement these broader principles. Pain and death will never be removed from the human condition, but an intentional and conscious evolution should find more efficient and elegant practices to fulfill the broader principles of variation and selection.
Besides, the goal isn’t to solve every philosophical dilemma. The goal is to situate technology within the larger story of life, to unite technology around a singular purpose, and to align technology with what life needs to flourish.
In summary
You are not a machine, or a computer, or an algorithm. You are a unique manifestation of the most precious thing in the universe—life itself. You are endowed with desires, agency, and a boundless imagination.
Technology comes from this same imagination—humanity’s greatest superpower—just like art, philosophy, and science. Technology has transformed us into agents with the power to evolve evolution.
As life’s most complex achievement, it is our responsibility to use the entirety of our imaginations as stewards of all life, both on Earth and beyond, both today and in perpetuity.
The wisdom to deploy technology in service of life depends on aligning our technological practices with the principles of life itself.
Let’s stop accepting technology that deadens us. By reorienting technology to life, we can align technology with purpose worthy of its power. We can align it with the very source from which it springs, the boundless human imagination in all of its entirety.
We can align technology to empower our role as life’s stewards: to play the infinite game and to expand the possibilities of what life can be and become.
We can align technology with life itself.
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Is this even possible? Are we wise enough to admit that something bigger is needed to guide our technology, or are we stuck? Do we have the collective will and intelligence to achieve something at this scale, or not? Do we still have the agency to define our own future, or is it too late?
There is only one way to find out. We will need to run the experiment.
This is excellent. Superbly written, strongly persuasive.