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The Tony Seba hypothesis is a big foundation to my optimism: We're going through an unprecedented convergence of disruptive key technologies. Precision fermentation, renewables and batteries, AI, and more. All of these reduce our ecological footprint and improve our ability to live at a high standard in a relatively autonomous fashion. The rate of improvement in these disruptive techs is not linear; a big part of the hypothesis is that they keep beating expert estimates on key metrics by huge amounts year over year, and when plotted on a graph are on a hockey stick trajectory. There's no one magic breakthrough that saves the day, rather, it's an accumulation of effort in all these different categories that makes the numbers work in our favor instead of going Malthusian.

The reason why it looks grim is simply that we aren't in the "other half of the chessboard" yet: we don't have the self-driving fleets out in number, we're still fighting over oil, we're still using traditional agriculture for our protein, and we have a pandemic and social unrest in the background.

"Tech" as we knew it in the late 20th century - tech used towards state bureaucratic ends to accumulate capital and defeat adversaries as in "O Superman's" electronic, petrochemical arms - has basically arrived at an endpoint where it's limited by imagination. It can make numbers go up, but it can't address philosophical challenges about how to organize society and whether economic "growth" is where we need to go. So increasingly it's the latter that are being discussed, and that drives up the unrest, because a discussion about numbers going up is "cool story", but one about truth and purpose threatens everyone. Truthful messaging about the state of things is actually very loud and clear: "we can't live like this, let go, grasp the future" and the backlash is "no, you can't tell me what to do, the future is scary and I'll die before I let go". It hits everyone at some point because everyone had a stake in how it was, so you end up with a lot of people in varying states of cynicism to fanaticism.

But we've been through such transitions already; in moving towards agriculture, building cities, industrializing. We can get through it, collectively. But it can be scary precisely because we don't understand a disruptive future and where its dangers are. There are no comforting stories to fall back on other than the apocalyptic ones.




What is precision fermentation?




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