Technology really exists for 2 reasons:

• Face to face - The point of technology is to enable yourself, and other ppl to show up more fully with the people they love (Eg. Quality of life improvements to not worry about material needs)
• Shoulder to shoulder - The point of technology is to enable you to have better experiences with people (Eg. Shared awe at beautiful megastructures)

Operating Modes

Perspectives on technology can be categorized in a few different ways, assuming that all groups want what's best for the world. Loosely follows Thomas Sowell's concepts of constrained and unconstrained.

• Constrained - Human nature is inherently limited and flawed. Historic wisdom, gradual progress, and constraints are important to protect the default human. Values tradition, understands that there may be limits.
• Unconstrained - Humans can do anything. Human nature is malleable and capable of continuous change. Believes we can fix or destroy anything
  

	Constrained	Unconstrained
Techno-Optimist	"Gradual technological improvements and respecting historical wisdom will make our lives better, within limits." Eg. Bill Gates	Humans can do anything so we'll be ok "Technology will fix everything. Humans will adapt and everything will be ok" Eg. Elon Musk
Techno-Pessimist	"Technological progress can't outpace the inherent flaws and limitations of human societies." Eg. Nicholas Carr, a surprising amount of academic study on technology	"Humans, and technology is capable of anything so we're fucked" Eg. Degrowthers

In Western liberal places in the 2020's, we tend towards unconstrained pessimistic. Directionally probably good to move in the direction of optimistic.

Problems problems problems

Residual notes from me thinking about what to work on. A couple of framing questions:

1. What does it take to create a civilization that is vital and resilient over the next 50 years?
2. If someone gave me 100 million dollars, what would I assemble task forces for?
3. If I could clone myself to work on different problems, what problems would there be >10% chance I would be interested in working on for the rest of my life?

Not in any particular order

Category	Goal	Rationale	Examples
Climate	Abundant clean energy	Energy is the vitality of a civilization. How do you make it cheap and reliable?	Base load generation from nuclear, hydro. Building out transmission infrastructure. Earthshots like fusion
	Practical, decarbonizing climate resilience	The only way to enable green transition is to make climate solutions too good to ignore.	High capacity/long-duration energy storage, scalable/quantifiable CDR with low uncertainty, mass electrification with non-climate co-benefits like heat pumps & electric stoves
Food	Affordable, fresh, nutrient dense foods	Wax-covered apples traveling 4000km cannot be the way	Lower cost farming, (PROPER) nutrition education in schools
	Reduce animal suffering	It’s a shame that for convenient nutritional completeness, we still have to mass factory farm and kill animals.	Alternative meats
Shelter/Living	Affordable housing in safe, mixed-use cities	Great housing theory of everything	Reforming zoning, lower cost construction, ADUs
	Aging well	We’ll all get here. How do we opt for square wave lifespans?	Elderly care, intergenerational housing, robot augmented care, longevity research
	Making commutes awesome	We will probably have to commute no matter what. How do we make them something that enhances people’s quality of life instead of detracting?	Walkable cities, transit availability, biking infrastructure
	Buildings that adapt to the environment	Who says our buildings need to be static? What does it mean for our buildings to be alive?	HVAC, air quality management, passive HAUS architecture
Production	Less invasive, safer resource extraction	Lead poisoning in water supplies from neighboring mines feels primitive. We can do much better.	Intelligent mining discovery
	Adaptable, fast manufacturing	We can design everything better with faster feedback loops. How to prototype things faster?	Modular hardware designs, operations research, additive printing
Information	Open sourced knowledge and schooling	If we made such efforts to get this information, why not share it?	Repositories of classes, MOOCs, public libraries
	Opt-in information streams	We’re input-output machines. To exist on the internet, your attention is constantly hijacked by things you don’t want/consent to.	Better social media, financing models for RSS feeds
	Understanding human emotion	How much differently would the world operate if we had true empathy?	Brain-computer interfaces
	Better decision making, reducing cost of experimentation	This is a residual of my fascination with the Cybersyn project.	High granularity simulation, compute availability, real-world modeling
	More visibility into the real world	Government aerial surveys happen annually, high high-priority locations are updated daily. What are we missing because we don’t see it?	Environmental sensing for weather, wildfire, heat, etc
	Being present in the real world	As much as we can design marvelous experiences, we should learn from the masters. Technology can enhance the real world	Human-computer interfaces that enhance engagement in world, rather than suck you into screen
Computing	Maintaining personal privacy	Oblivion is a realm of potential, it’s an unaccountable region of the self where new, weird ideas come from. Privacy is the protective barrier that keeps oblivion safe.	Identity verification and validation, quantum-resistant cryptography
	Increasing access to the internet	Being online changed my life for the better. Everyone should have the chance to experience it	Internet for all via satellites
Work	Expanding the collective human imagination	A sufficiently transformative tool can form new industries	AI-integrated knowledge work tools, media generation, creative tooling
	Automating away repetitive, dangerous tasks	It makes no sense that humans inspect crumbling bridges and deteriorating grids. Also, this can’t be the best use of human creativity.	Task-specific robots, drones
Health	Detecting and treating diseases when they are still preventable	40% of deaths could be prevented through lifestyle changes, early detection, or treatment	Home detection kits, genetic disposition testing, obesity reduction for heart disease
	Increasing average baseline physical health	Good health, by way of sleep, exercise, and diet, is a multiplier on quality of life.	Walkable cities, community centers, sleep quality research, blue light reduction
	Helping people feel at ease	Poor health, by way of spiked cortisol, is a detractor on quality of life	Increasing availability of psycho-technologies, meditation, friendships
	Improving understanding of women's health	50% of population but deeply underfunded	General maternal health and menopause research
National Security	Increasing resilience of critical infrastructure	If we can’t keep people safe at home literally, what are we doing?	Critical infrastructure security, encryption, intrusion detection
Meta problems	AGI???	What if knowledge was free?	Model development, hazing
	Optimizing talent allocation	How do you draw the best out of people? How do you make sure that people are spending their time on what is best used on?	Immigration reform, meta-labels, ISA academies
	Increasing agency in children	Kids are capable of way more than we give them credit for.	Alternate schools, mentorship programs, safe streets
	Improving political and scientific apparatus	How do we create systems that are resilient to bad actors but can sufficiently adapt to new problems? What would it take to design a government that could survive forever?	Political experimentation zones, metascience, grant allocation, voting mechanisms
	Enabling ambition, entrepreneurial infrastructure	People benchmark what they can do based on the people around them, how do you give them more chances to see/reach for the adjacent possible? How do you keep enabling this when life calcifies and people are necessarily more experienced but also more risk averse?	Insurance for freelancers/entrepreneurs, cultural movements towards sabbaticals, accelerators, immigration reform
Cultural wellness	Crushing loneliness	We are best when we are together	High trust, ritualistic, non-exclusive common gathering spaces
	Deeply archiving knowledge	Systematic ways to document and preserve the present as it happens	Knowledge recovery, painting restoration, vaults, long-term digital information storage
	Making beautiful things	Being surrounded by beautiful things means that you can afford to be more sensitive to aesthetics. Beauty begets more appreciation for beauty	Statues, museums, delightful architecture, music everywhere
	Providing healthy avenues for mass competition	They are just fun.	Large scale global sporting events, game shows LOL
	Helping people find love	Partnering early and well is the best thing you can do for quality of life	Matchmaking services, dating apps