https://balajis.com/the-purpose-of-technology/
If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.
At first that sounds crazy. But let's start with the premise: is the proximate purpose of technology to reduce scarcity? Think about how a breakthrough is described: faster, smaller, cheaper, better. All of these words mean that with this new technology, one can do more with less. In the digital world, Google made information on any topic free to anyone with an Internet connection, and WhatsApp made it free to communicate with anyone. In the physical world, innovations like the Haber Process or the Green Revolution allowed us to produce more with less. In a real sense, these technologies reduced scarcity.
Now for the second half of the sentence, the logical implication. Is the ultimate purpose of technology to eliminate mortality? Well, mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had infinite time, we would be less concerned with whether something was faster. The reason speed has value is because time has value; the reason time has value is because human life has value, and lifespans are finite. If you made lifespans much longer, you'd reduce the effective cost of everything. Thus insofar as reducing scarcity is acknowledged to be the proximate purpose of technology, eliminating the main source of scarcity – namely mortality – is the ultimate purpose of technology. Life extension is the most important thing we can invent.
And it's actually feasible today. It's been shown that we can extend healthy lifespans in mammals – and even reverse aging to bring people back to youth. Here's link after link after link after link on the topic.
Six years ago, a lifetime in the aging field, the mere suggestion that aging could be reversed was enough to have your colleagues & donors screw up their noses. Tom Rando @StanfordMed deserves a shout out for being brave enough back then to use the word "reversal" openly 6/n— David Sinclair, PhD (@davidasinclair) May 11, 2020
If you want visual evidence that reversing aging is possible, here are photographs of people looking years younger as a side effect of a treatment for lung cancer:
You'd think there would be thousands of groups working on this, that all this would be international news. But you probably weren't aware of any of it. You probably also weren't aware of how far we've come on gene therapy, how much has been done in regenerative medicine, how advanced the latest bionic eyes are – or how deadly COVID-19 was as a threat until March of 2020.
That is because people with scientific and technical backgrounds have not taken it upon ourselves to write about technological progress as a duty. We need to take time out of our busy days to make the case, repeatedly and with high production values, that technological progress is the most important thing we can do for broad-based prosperity and economic growth, and for life itself.
That starts with testing, drugs, treatments, and vaccines for COVID-19. But it goes far beyond that. Put another way: we may not get life extension or the whole suite of transhumanist technologies (brain-machine interfaces, stem cells, CRISPR gene therapy, and more) unless you, personally, evangelize them online. Not just tweets, but articles. Not just articles, but videos. Not just videos, but feature films. And not just a few films, but an entire Netflix original library's worth, a parallel tech media ecosystem full of inspirational content for technological progressives. A lifetime's worth of content that makes the case for immutable money, infinite frontier, artificial intelligence, and eternal life.
This may mean less focus on the businesses and personalities of technology. After all, do we care whether the technology for reversing aging is developed by a startup, an academic lab, a scientific consortium, or a solitary biohacker in their garage? No. What we care about is the goal of transcendence. If the technology ends up being completely free and open source, so much the better. A corporate vehicle is just one means to an end, not an end in itself. We may need to understand every detail of operating a business, but we can't get lost in those details.
The point of doing a startup after all is to build something you can't buy. Money can't yet buy you a trip to Mars. Or a neural implant. Or a medical tricorder. And at one point in the not-too-distant past it could not buy you a web browser, a search engine, or a smartphone. When the iPhone did not exist, people had to invent it. And they needed to be inspired to invent it.
for iphone 1:the original mac,blade runner,2001: a space odyssey,sony walkman TPS-L2, braun ET66, the concorde, massimo vignale, henry dreyfuss, apollo 11, the beatles,warp records,NASA,polaroid,arthur c. clarke,eero saarinenamong others… https://t.co/F3ayC03T3y— Imran Chaudhri (@imranchaudhri) February 3, 2019
Why doesn't inspirational content for technological progressives exist in abundance? Part of the reason is adverse selection. While science fiction – even dystopian science fiction – can inspire, the scientists, engineers, founders, and funders thus inspired are often more occupied with building technology than evangelizing it. But this in turn means that we aren't directly educating the next generation, or the public at large.