Herein, I inscribe my beliefs on how to spend time on this planet.

• Premise 1: I want to use my career as a platform to make the world a better place

• Premise 2: I believe that the world becomes a better place when more people have access to a path to self-actualization

• Premise 3: Self-actualization is not viable for the billions of impoverished & poor people on this planet and there is a need to increase resources available to them in a scaled & sustainable way

• Premise 4: The only ways to increase access to resources is a) help people earn more and b) decrease the cost of goods; either way, decrease the average net cost of goods for everyone

• Premise 5: Ideas and organizations that do more with less at a global scale in novel ways can decrease the average net cost of goods

Conclusion: I want to help build ideas, technology and organizations that have the potential to dramatically reduce costs and increase access to everyone globally.

Anecdotally, I think this happens at the fringes. Let’s expand the pie for everyone. No one is fighting over a cup of water when we are all standing next to perpetual, sustainable waterfalls.

• The logical conclusion of this is to create a “net-zero cost world” in steady state - where there is no conception of zero-sum scarcity - and where essential services are so cheap, that all humans focus on creative, high value pursuits that lead to fulfillment.

• Interestingly, this seems like a weird, interesting intersection of capitalism, anarchism & communism ideas.

• For the purposes of this reflection, I define technology is anything that does more with less. From fire, wheels, plumbing, HVACs, fulcrums all the way to software that may do the same job as a piece of hardware, which may require more carbon, materials, labor hours & efforts.

• Here is an example of decreasing average net costs: In country A, folks can afford a house by working n years. In country B, folks can afford a house by working 3n years. Country A is better. This needs to be extrapolated over all essential goods and services.

• Country A may be better due to the following: Building houses is cheaper per capita. This may be due to a variety of reasons, such as :

  • Physical: Scale or efficiency in the process of creating and moving materials causing cheap wood, paint, or metals; Maintenance / resilience of the said materials, requiring less maintenance & replacement costs

  • Nonphysical: Greater access to financial products such as a reasonable mortgage, pricing transparency; Better governance & policy that affects land prices or regulates rights and information for a symmetric housing market;

• I assert that both physical and nonphysical factors can be dramatically improved using technology. For example, cheap renewable materials or 3d printed modular homes can reduce rents (~33% of rent = house materials & construction) (Sightline). More resilient materials that are easy to maintain can address 14% of a typical rent payment. Cheaper, safer, greener ways of maximizing utilization per unit area can reduce the impact of high land prices.

• Technology can achieve better governance with more transparency and access to more data for decision making. eg: Digital payments can enable direct benefit transfers from governments, taking out the middleman… and taking out their “cut” which can manifest in dark ways by giving up too much power to unaccountable, unelected officials. Technology can strengthen our democracies, if used creatively - especially in the global south, where government officials may be deeply corrupt but lack of government = mass misery and death.

• The best part of technology is that it is sustainable over the long term - it doesn’t require a political process that may be temporary (in a democracy, 4-5 years) or via an authoritarian government (which may collapse in a Black Swan event). No one can take technology once it is invented. Bad technology, in a democratic environment, will be deactivated and cast aside.

• I would be remiss if I did not consider the fact that technology can cause extremely grave damage to humanity, completely and totally refuting the idea behind premise 1; a reasonable consensus mechanism on technology is absolutely and unquestionably critical - and per my values, this must be decided democratically and by the people affected by the technology.

• On the other hand, some sufficiently advanced technology seems scary and bad. By the very virtue of how innovative it is, there are multiple ways of imagining horrific use cases. Eg: The first execution by electric chair happened in 1890, 35 years before 50% of US households had access to electricity. That’s 3 whole decades, and it is viable for people to associate electricity with death before they have enjoyed its benefits.

• Other sufficiently advanced technology seems “stupid”. I love this NewsWeek article from the early 90s on the internet: Why The Web Won’t Be Nirvana. Precisely because of the fact that this technology seems “stupid”, there are generally not enough people working on it, creating disproportional gains for the initial players (internet billionaires, and possible future / current crypto billionaires).

• We should cautiously embrace stupid technology ideas: teleportation, food in pills, beating death, and perhaps more integration with digital machines (I have back pain - I’m done with biology…). We should aspire to be the Jetsons, with everyone having equal access to these technologies, and a right to decline to use said technology.

• We need to think from first principles, zero-to-one. Thank you to to Peter Theil’s YC talk at Stanford for forever changing my life and how I look at the world.