Building What Money Can’t Buy
Part I - Technology
Putting in a lot of labor doesn't necessarily generate value.
Putting in the right technology often does.
The Value of Technology
Building What Money Can’t Buy
I’m not money motivated. I know some people are. I wear the same T-shirts I wore in grad school. I don’t own cars or anything like that. I look at money as a tool to build things I can’t buy today.
Elon Musk is building SpaceX because he can’t buy a trip to Mars. You can have all the money in the world, but you can’t buy a trip to Mars. One hundred years ago, the richest man in the world couldn’t buy an iPhone. That’s the kind of progress I care about.
We don’t have an unambiguous metric for progress. If you must pick one, we can make a strong case for life expectancy. In that area, progress was exponential but has recently decelerated—and even reversed.
Life expectancy used to be the metric of technological progress. More recently, people are focused on stock prices or GDP, which are fine, but ultimately subjective human metrics as opposed to objective physical metrics like age.
We have to start talking more about our values than our valuations. Money is only a tool. What really matters is building something you can’t buy. That’s how we actually improve metrics like life expectancy.
True technologists should aspire to change physical metrics. We can change life expectancy from 70 years old to 150. We need to focus on truly transformative technologies—not just life extension, but brain-machine interfaces, limb regeneration, curing deafness with RNA injections, and curing blindness with bionic eyes. We can make actual miracles with technology today.
The emotional case for technology:
- Why accept 30k deaths/year rather than speed up the development of self-driving cars?
- Why let regulators prevent us from creating life-saving biomedicine?
- Why accept non-accidental death at all, rather than pushing life extension?
Using technology to be high agency is definitely something I believe in. Of course you should use the best possible tool. Why wouldn’t you? If you're trying to move something and a lever is right there on the ground, why would you not use that?
Often people don't want to use a new tool or technology. They want to do things the way they always have because learning how to use that lever is new. They are uncertain and afraid. What happens if the lever breaks? What are the risks in using the lever? Why don't we just lift it with our bodies like we've always done?
I think it is ridiculously, obviously good to use the better technologies. That is still much more rare than you might think.
