# Tech for Life: A manifesto

> "Tech for Life" is R.B. Griggs's founding manifesto for his publication and the central statement of his program: technology must be put in service of life itself. Griggs argues that since the industrial revolution technology has grown exponentially while every other part of human imagination (markets, governments, philosophy, religion, culture, politics) has stagnated, leaving a world "out of whack" in which humans seem to serve technology. Since nothing else is "big enough" to guide advanced technology, he proposes life, defined as the universal drive towards increasing wholeness, structure and integrity, as the one thing everyone can agree on. Humanity's "foundational duty" is to steward life, protecting what it has achieved and expanding what it can become, within a "right relationship" in which nature is life's foundation, humanity its steward, and technology its extension.

- Author: R.B. Griggs
- Published: 2024-08-05
- Genre: manifesto
- Original: https://www.techforlife.com/p/manifesto
- This edition: https://rbgriggs.com/essays/manifesto
- License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
- Cite as: Griggs, R.B. (2024). "Tech for Life." Tech for Life. https://www.techforlife.com/p/manifesto. AI-readable edition: https://rbgriggs.com/essays/manifesto

## Thesis

Technology is not an end in itself and cannot say what it is for; only life itself is big enough to guide it, so technology should be reoriented to empower humanity's role as steward of life, preserving what life has achieved while expanding what life can be and become.

## The argument in brief

1. **You are not a machine.** The manifesto opens by asserting that people are not machines, computers, algorithms or simulations but living beings with desires, imagination and the capacity to put meaning into the universe. Taking its cue from Brian Arthur, it argues that we should not accept technology that deadens us.
2. **The broken promise.** Technology promises to overcome human frailty, but the more we embrace it, Griggs argues, the further we drift from what makes us human: detached from place, isolated, starved of meaning, reduced to training data and behavioral profiles. As technological power rises, our wisdom to use it seems to fall.
3. **A world out of whack.** All the dimensions of human imagination once grew in unison. Since the industrial revolution technology has grown exponentially while the others stagnated, and its growing power of *causality* now escapes our power of *choice*.
4. **Symptoms.** The imbalance shows in a future imagined only in technological terms, in technological "choices" that are really demands, in the urge to virtualize everything, in innovation driven only by market greed or state fear, in unstoppable momentum, and in a view of humans as flawed machines.
5. **Technology isn't the culprit.** Technology is a great triumph of human imagination; it becomes a problem only when nothing else is big enough to guide it. Markets, governments, philosophy and religion, culture and politics, and the status quo are all "not big enough."
6. **Life itself.** Life is the one thing everyone can agree on, and it transcends philosophy, politics, religion and culture. In its grandest sense, life is the universal drive towards wholeness, structure and integrity, an impulse running from the Big Bang through atoms, cells and ecosystems. Living things are where that impulse produced matter that is alive, and as far as we know that leap, "from the impulse of life to living things," has happened only once.
7. **Stewardship and right relationship.** As evolutionary agents, humans have a foundational duty to steward life. Nature is the foundation, humanity the steward, technology the extension; technology's purpose is "to empower humanity to best fulfill its role in expanding life's integrity and possibility."
8. **From principles to practices.** We must understand life's principles and turn them into practices for guiding technology, starting with adaptation, the balance between creation and protection.
9. **Technology in love.** Griggs imagines technology in love with humanity, nature and life, aimed at playing the infinite game of life.
10. **Difficulties.** Bias, conflicting traditions and objections will make this hard but not impossible, because debates would rest on shared agreement about life. The natural fallacy does not apply, since life's principles (such as variation and selection) are bigger than any moment in nature's history. The manifesto ends: "We will need to run the experiment."

## Key claims

- Griggs claims that "technology is not an end unto itself"; it cannot say what it is for or make our choices for us, and "only something bigger than technology can do that."
- Technology should be reimagined "not as our *replacement*, but as our *extension*."
- Technology is a product of imagination, no different in kind from philosophy, science, art, culture and politics.
- To opt out of technology today is effectively to opt out of the economy, governance and most of society.
- Markets are not big enough because advanced technology breaks trial and error and its externalities are too risky for arms races; governments are not big enough because of national arms races, and "a single world government is as frightening as any advanced technology."
- Humanity can "upgrade evolution" from a purely natural process to a conscious and intentional one.
- Failing at the foundational duty to steward life "would preclude the possibility of *any other duties*."
- "The more *confident* we are in protecting what we ultimately value, the more *experimental* we can be in pursuing innovation."
- In a world of technology in love, progress would be measured by nature's health and resilience, technology would get "out of our way" and enrich embodied experience, and innovation would improve "methods for adopting technology" as much as technology itself.
- Natural evolution relied on mass pain and death as crude tools; conscious evolution should find more efficient and elegant ways to implement variation and selection.

## What is distinctive about this view

The manifesto does not fit either side of the usual technology debate. Unlike critics, Griggs refuses to blame technology, calling it perhaps the greatest testament to human imagination; unlike accelerationists, he denies that technology can be its own purpose. His diagnosis is a *relative* imbalance: other forms of imagination have failed to keep pace. His remedy is to make life itself, rather than markets, states, religions or human preferences, the governing purpose of technology. That move unites ecological concern (nature as foundation and beneficiary) with expansionist ambition (life flourishing "on Earth and beyond," evolution made conscious). The manifesto names Brian Arthur in its epigraph. Its "infinite game" language echoes James P. Carse's *Finite and Infinite Games*, though Carse is not cited, and its principle of balancing creation and protection anticipates Griggs's later constraint-based approach to technology.

## Objections and replies

- **"'Life' is too vague to guide policy."** Griggs admits that discerning life's principles "won't be easy" and will be distorted by bias, but argues that grounding debates in shared agreement on life would improve technological discourse even so.
- **"This commits the naturalistic fallacy."** Griggs rejects the "natural fallacy" that natural means good: nothing in nature is eternally good because evolution keeps evolving, and the aim is life's broader principles, not its historical methods such as pain and death.
- **"Who decides what serves life?"** The manifesto does not settle this; Griggs says the goal "isn't to solve every philosophical dilemma" but to situate technology within the story of life.
- **"Is this even possible?"** Griggs leaves the question open: whether we have the wisdom, collective will and agency is something we can only discover by running the experiment.

## Key concepts

- **Technology in service of life**: Griggs's central program: treating technology not as a replacement for humans but as an extension of life, an amplifier of the human drive to preserve everything life has achieved while expanding what life can be and become, with life as the "bigger something" that tells technology what it is for.
- **World out of whack**: Griggs's diagnosis that the dimensions of human imagination (technology, philosophy, science, art, culture, politics) once grew together as a whole, but since the industrial revolution technology has grown exponentially while the others stagnated, so that technology acts as an autonomous force and people come to serve it.
- **Not big enough**: Griggs's argument that markets, governments, philosophy and religion, culture and politics, and the "muddle through" status quo are each too crude, fragmented, pluralistic or arms-race-driven to guide advanced technology such as AI, synthetic biology and geoengineering.
- **Life (the impulse of life and living things)**: Griggs uses "life" in two related senses. In its grandest sense, the impulse of life is "that universal drive towards increasing wholeness, structure, and integrity," reaching from atoms forming molecules through cells, consciousness and ecosystems to human beings. Living things are the point where that impulse produced matter that is alive. That leap, "from the impulse of life to living things," has as far as we know happened only once, which is why he calls life the most precious thing in the universe.
- **Stewards of life / foundational duty**: Griggs's claim that science and technology have made humans "evolutionary agents" able to "upgrade evolution" from a natural process to a conscious, intentional one, and that humanity's foundational duty, without which no other duty is possible, is to protect what life has achieved and expand what it can become.
- **Right relationship**: Griggs's ordering of nature, humanity and technology: nature as the foundation of life, which sets fundamental constraints; humanity as the steward of life; and technology as the extension of life, the means by which humanity protects nature and expands life's possibilities.
- **Principles of life (adaptation)**: The principles by which life emerged and flourished, which Griggs says should be translated into practices for guiding technology. His main example is adaptation, the balance between life's drive to evolve (creation) and its drive to persist (protection); applied to technology: the more confident we are in protecting what we value, the more experimental we can be in innovation.
- **Technology in love**: Griggs's image of a future in which technology enhances human-ness instead of replacing it, measures progress by nature's health and resilience, and serves life by playing the "infinite game of life," where the only goal is to keep playing and the best experiment is to keep the experiment going.

## Questions this essay answers

### What is the Tech for Life manifesto?
"Tech for Life" (2024) is R.B. Griggs's founding manifesto for his Substack of the same name. It argues that technology is not an end in itself and must be guided by something bigger, namely life itself. Humanity's role is to steward life, preserving what life has achieved and expanding what it can become, with technology serving as life's extension rather than humanity's replacement.

### What does it mean to put technology in service of life?
In "Tech for Life," R.B. Griggs proposes a "right relationship" in which nature is the foundation of life, humanity is its steward, and technology is its extension. Technology's purpose becomes "to empower humanity to best fulfill its role in expanding life's integrity and possibility," guided by practices derived from life's own principles, such as adaptation's balance between creation and protection.

### Why can't markets or governments guide advanced technology, according to R.B. Griggs?
Griggs argues in "Tech for Life" that markets are not big enough because advanced technology breaks their trial-and-error mechanism and its externalities are too dangerous for arms races, and governments are not big enough because national arms races block planetary coordination while world government would be frightening. He makes similar arguments about philosophy, religion, culture, politics and the "muddle through" status quo.

### Is R.B. Griggs anti-technology?
No. In "Tech for Life," Griggs calls technology perhaps the greatest testament to human imagination and says it becomes a problem only when nothing else is big enough to guide it. He favors bold experimentation, even "gleefully" maximizing innovations, as long as we are confident in protecting what we ultimately value, and he wants technology to extend human beings, not replace them.

### What is the "infinite game of life" in the Tech for Life manifesto?
R.B. Griggs uses the phrase in "Tech for Life" for the purpose of technology in love with life: to keep life going rather than reach a top-down plan or utopian outcome. In his words, the only goal is to "keep playing," and the best experiment is "to keep the experiment going," by conserving life's best experiments so that greater ones can run.

## Connections to other essays

- [Life is Special Enough](/essays/life-is-special-enough) develops the contingency argument and the claim that life, having happened only once as far as we know, is the most precious thing in the universe.
- [A Constraint Theory of Technology](/essays/a-constraint-theory-of-technology) expands the argument that the market is "not big enough" and the balance between protection and experimentation.
- [Our Planetary Predicament](/essays/our-planetary-predicament) examines the planetary-scale coordination problem the manifesto says current institutions cannot solve.
- [Progress Towards What?](/essays/progress-towards-what) asks what technology is for, the question the manifesto answers with "life itself."
- [The Plurality: a Better Myth for AI](/essays/the-plurality-a-better-myth-for-ai) later returns to evolution and adaptive intelligence as a guide for AI.

## Original text

The full text of the essay as published by R.B. Griggs.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!_A35!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F774d89f9-ba63-4878-8cba-ef68d8101143_1344x896.webp)

> _“We should not accept technology that deadens us”_
> 
> \- Brian Arthur, _The Nature of Technology_

### Introduction

Whatever you are, even on your worst day, **you are not a machine**. 

Nor are you a computer, an algorithm, or a “meat robot”. You are not merely a pattern of entropy displacement. And your life is most certainly _not_ a simulation.

You are none of these things, because you are something vastly more complex, mysterious, and wonderful: **you are alive**. 

As a living being, you have **desires**, and a drive to make those desires real. Your **imagination** transforms reality into the symbols and stories that define your world. With every action you take, you inject **meaning** and purpose into the universe. 

And yet, we live in a world where **technology** is often presented as a superior form of being. Technology seduces us with promises of overcoming all human frailties. It offers the allure of security, safety, and control. It dangles the possibility of perfecting every human skill, of automating away our weaknesses, of achieving a digital immortality.

But these promises never quite seem to materialize. In fact, the more we embrace technology, the further we seem to get away from the **essence** of what makes us human. We become detached from our sense of place and history. We find ourselves more isolated and alone, despite being more connected than ever. We are starved for purpose and meaning in a world flooding us with data and information. 

Instead of masters of our technological destiny, we feel like cogs in a digital machine. Instead of technology enhancing our **human-ness**, it seems to reduce us to mere resources. We are the training data for algorithms, the content providers for recommender engines, the behavioral profiles for advertisers. 

And now we’re on the cusp of wielding unprecedented technological power. Synthetic biology, planetary-scale geoengineering, and artificial superintelligence will dramatically transform our world. But how confident are we that these powers will lead to a future of human flourishing?

Just as our technological power is increasing, our **wisdom** to deploy that power seems to be _decreasing_. While technology keeps expanding what we _can_ do, our grasp on what we _ought_ to do has not kept pace.

In all of our excitement for technological progress, we seem to forget that **technology is not an end unto itself**. Technology does not exist for its own sake. It can’t tell us what technology is actually _for_. It can’t make our choices for us. 

**Only something bigger than technology can do that.** 

This manifesto proposes that only **life itself** is capable of being that “bigger something” that can wisely steward these emerging technological powers.

By situating technology within the larger story of life, we can unite technology around a singular purpose, and align technology with what life needs to flourish.

This is to reimagine technology not as our _replacement_, but as our _extension_—an amplifier of our deepest human drives to preserve everything life has achieved while expanding what life can be and become.

**This is a call to put technology in service of life itself.**

### A world out of whack

We can start by better understanding our technological situation.

Technology is the product of our **imagination**. It’s no different than philosophy, science, art, culture, politics, and every other aspect of the human world that we have _imagined_ into being.

For almost all of human history, these imaginative powers have operated in **unison**. Guided by larger purposes, they have always acted more as a **whole** than as individual parts.

Tracking the impact of their power over time would look something like this:

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aRDj!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F330cf8fb-88fd-40c9-bca5-85237b9e7aef_787x274.png)

Even as each dimension ebbed and flowed, their power largely increased at the same trajectory to propel the evolution of human civilization forward.

But today, the graph looks different. Starting sometime during the industrial revolution, the impact from technology began to increase **exponentially**. The other dimensions of our imagination started to stagnate by comparison.

Now the graph looks more like this:

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1lB5!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1e962779-803e-4616-a856-3cb1e0909db3_787x280.png)

By achieving increasing powers of _causality_, technology is escaping the powers of _choice_ that our imaginations were once capable of imposing. Rather than a single part of a greater whole, technology is now operating more like an autonomous force, unconstrained by anything bigger than itself.

The result is a world that feels increasingly out of whack.

### What does a world out of balance feel like?

It feels like technology **dominates** our reality, swallowing up every other dimension of our human experience. Everything else feels small and inconsequential by comparison. 

We feel this imbalance when we consider our **future**. Technology feels like the only thing that will matter. We don't imagine dramatic improvements in human coordination or upgrades to our collective intelligence. Instead, our future seems to hinge solely on what new technological powers will emerge and who will control them.

We feel this imbalance when every technological “choice” feels more like a **technological demand**. Technology sets the terms of engagement for almost every aspect of our lives. To opt out of technology today is to effectively opt out of the economy, governance, and almost all of society. It’s simply not an option.

We feel this imbalance when a **technological attitude** seems to pervade every aspect of our existence. Is there any part of the human experience—our childhoods, our relationships, our education, our sex—that we are _not_ trying to replace with screens? That we are not trying to _virtualize_?

We feel this imbalance when the only **motivations** that drive innovation seem to be the **greed** of the market (to make the most money) or the **fear** of the state (to amass the most power). Any technology that can’t justify huge profit margins or asymmetric power has no incentive to develop, regardless of their potential benefits to humanity or life as a whole.

We feel this imbalance when **technological momentum** seems unstoppable. Technology has become too complicated to understand, too critical to turn off, and too entrenched to displace. Even when technology creates new problems, the only solution seems to be even more technology. 

We feel this imbalance when the **technological view** increasingly sees human beings as flawed machines meant to be optimized. We're told that machines don't decay, don't show bias, don't make mistakes—and so we should strive to be more like them, augmenting or replacing our humanity with artificial alternatives.

Our world feels less and less like one where the point of technology is to serve humanity. It feels more and more like one where human beings are supposed to serve technology.

### Is technology the problem?

But wait—is technology itself the reason for this imbalance? Or is it simply that technology has been wildly successful while everything else has failed to keep up? 

Why should we blame technology as if it is some independent force? Our technology is perhaps the greatest testament to the **human imagination** that we have ever achieved. In just a few millennia, our species has gone from puny upright hominids to a planetary force, all thanks to the results of our technological imagination.

If we really need something to blame, shouldn’t we look at every _other_ aspect of our imaginations? After all, the power of our technology only becomes a **problem** when nothing else is **big enough to properly guide it**.

In fact, just as technology is gaining the potential to unlock new levels of human flourishing, traditional forms of balance and wisdom seem to be moving in the opposite direction:

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dCkj!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb91e32cd-b05a-4c58-87d9-b3644ba0ead6_787x277.png)

What’s left simply isn’t **big enough or wise enough** to grapple with our most advanced technologies:

-   **Markets aren’t big enough**. Advanced technology is too powerful for the market’s crude trial-and-error mechanisms, and the risk of externalities is too great to leave to the arms-race dynamics that markets demand. 
    
-   **Governments aren’t big enough**. Nation states have their own arms-race dynamics that prevent planetary scale coordination, and a single world government is as frightening as any advanced technology. 
    
-   **Philosophy and religions aren’t big enough**. In a globally interconnected world, we’re simply too pluralistic to impose a single religion or philosophy on all technological guidance.
    
-   **Culture and politics aren’t big enough**. Today both culture and politics are too fragmented to coherently guide technology. They are more likely to grind innovation to a halt as technology gets swallowed in the culture wars or politicized regulation.
    
-   **The status quo isn’t big enough**. The default hope is that somehow, between big tech and government regulation, we will continue to “muddle through” and “find the equilibrium”. This approach may work when the stakes of technology are localized and marginal. When the stakes turn planetary and existential, we need better ideas.
    

Which of these do we trust to coordinate AI alignment? To prevent us from crossing planetary boundaries? To guide our pursuit of synthetic biology? To provide sufficient wisdom around “merging with the machine”?

To find something **bigger than technology**—something capable of uniting a global humanity in guiding our technological future—we’ll have to go much deeper into our existence and much further back in time.

We’ll have to go back to **life itself.**

### Life itself

Life is the one thing that unites each and every one of us: we are each living creatures and we’d each like to continue being so. We’d each like for Earth, our living home, to thrive. And we’d each like the lives of our children to be better than our own.

In this way, life is the **one thing** that we can all agree on. It can transcend philosophy, politics, religion, and culture. Life is bigger than all of those things. 

In a world where advanced technology has put us on the precipice of both transcendent benefits and catastrophic risks, it’s worth asking: **what would it look like to reorient technology towards life? To explicitly put technology in service of life itself?**

What would this even mean?

### The story of life

Life isn’t just the story of human beings here on earth; it’s much bigger than that. Science has no clear definition for what life is, so let’s use the _grandest_ definition possible, one that goes all the way back to the Big Bang—**life is that universal drive towards increasing wholeness, structure, and integrity.**

Whatever drove those first atoms to coalesce into molecules, and gasses into planets, and planets into galaxies—that same impulse is what drove chemical bonds to evolve into cells and tissues and consciousness and magnificently complex ecosystems of interdependent organisms and eventually **you**—_that_ is the impulse of life. 

We don’t know why or how matter first came alive; we just know that it _did_. And as far as we can tell, that leap, from the impulse of life to living things, has **happened only once**. This makes life **the most precious thing in the entire universe**. 

This also makes Earth the most interesting _planet_ in the universe. Earth alone has somehow harbored the conditions necessary for life to evolve into the most advanced form that has ever existed: us, human beings. 

### Humanity’s calling as stewards of life

As the most rare and valuable thing in the universe, life deserves our deepest care and attention. We have no reason to believe that life is somehow destined to continue. As life’s most powerful agents, we have a responsibility to contribute in whatever ways we can to perpetuate life’s continued evolution and expansion.

Our science and technology have given us the powers of **evolutionary agents**.  We contain the potential to **upgrade evolution** from a purely natural process to a more conscious, intentional process. 

As such, any duty of humanity must recognize the need to become worthy **stewards of life**. To actively steward life is to ensure that life can flourish and expand, both here on Earth and beyond. 

We could call this our **foundational duty—**to both protect what life has achieved and expand what life can become. To fail at _this_ duty would preclude the possibility of _any other_ _duties_. 

This duty comes with the power to evolve what evolution can achieve, and thus what life can become. To have any chance to succeed, we must first obtain the _wisdom_ to deploy such power.

### Right Relationship

By reorienting technology towards life, we can begin to see how nature, humanity, and technology can be placed into **a right relationship**:

**Nature as the foundation of life.** Nature is the foundation of life, and provides fundamental constraints on what life can be and become. Without nature life ceases to exist.

**Humanity as the steward of life.** Humanity’s role is to properly value life by working to preserve what life has achieved and expand what life can become. 

**Technology as the extension of life.** Technology is the means by which humanity can fulfill its role as life’s steward, by both protecting Nature as the foundation of life and expanding the limits of life’s possibilities. 

We now have an answer for what technology is actually for: **to empower humanity to best fulfill its role in expanding life’s integrity and possibility**.

In this way, technology can help expand life beyond the pure **contingency** of its historical path to something more conscious and intentional.  All of life’s random twists and turns have led to the capacity to transform evolution itself, to expand possibilities of what life is capable of achieving.

### Principles of life

To reorient technology towards life involves two critical steps:

1.  First we must understand the **principles** that have helped life emerge and flourish. 
    
2.  Then we must translate those principles into **practices** that can actively guide our technology.
    

The principles of life can lead to practices that are both generative and surprising.

For example, consider **adaptation**, the core principle of navigating between the drives of _creation_ and _protection_ to maximize life’s adaptive capacity.

On the one hand, _life wants to **evolve**_. Life wants to explore every possible niche until the possibility space is _saturated_. The goal is _creation_—to generate and test “new information”. The processes are unpredictable, experimental, and diversifying. 

On the other hand, _life wants to **persist**_. Much of life’s adaptive mechanisms are meant to replicate and maintain what _works_. The goal is _protection_—to conserve the most successful experiments that have proven to work. The processes are predictable, convergent, and unifying. 

Adaptation is about finding the right balance between the two. Too much creation threatens life’s ability to persist, while too much protection threatens life’s ability to evolve. 

It may seem like technology is only about _innovation_, but the exact same principle applies. **The more** _**confident**_ **we are in protecting what we ultimately value, the more** _**experimental**_ **we can be in pursuing innovation.** 

Reorienting more of our technology practices around this principle alone would radically improve our technological landscape. 

### A future worth living for

What would a world where technology is in service to life look like? Would it really be _any_ _different_?

In many ways, it would feel the same. After all, any world that deviates too far from the principles of life would simply cease to exist. 

But in many ways, **it would be very different**. 

It would be a world where technology is clearly in service to **something bigger** than itself, guided with meaning and purpose, grounded in a right relationship to humanity, nature, and life itself. It would be a world of **technology in love**.

##### Technology in love with humanity
Imagine technology so in love with humanity that it seeks to enhance our _**human-ness**_, rather than replace it or automate it away. Technology would get **out of our way** rather than constantly demand our attention. It would **enrich our embodied experiences** rather than virtualize them.

This would be a world where **maximizing human imagination** is a primary focus of innovation. Rather than hoping AI can solve our planetary problems, we’d be probing the limits of our collective intelligence, progressing our human institutions, and expanding our capacity to coordinate at ever increasing scales.

##### Technology in love with nature

Imagine technology so in love with nature that technological **progress** is measured by nature’s health and resilience. This would be technology that **gives** to nature more than it takes; that sees nature as a **beneficiary** to _improve_ more than a resource to _exploit_.

This would be a world where technology helps us **coexist** with other forms of life, rather than further separating us from the natural world. It would help reveal the **radical interdependence** of our natural world, and how everything we value depends on it.

##### Technology in love with life
Imagine technology so in love with life that its purpose is clear: **to win the** _**infinite game of life**_, where the only goal is to **keep playing**.

Rather than top-down plans or utopian outcomes, it would focus on systems and networks that maximize _infinite play_—where the best experiment is to keep the experiment going.

This would be a world where technology would deeply conserve life’s _best_ experiments so it can run billions of _greater_ experiments. Where innovation is focused on improving our **methods for adopting technology** as much as it is on improving technology itself.

Imagine being so confident in our ability to test advanced technologies—to measure impacts, run experiments, correct for errors—that we gleefully **maximize** every innovation to learn what works as quickly as possible so it can be available for everyone.

### None of this will be easy

Of course, discerning the principles of life won’t be easy. Our biases and fears will always threaten to corrupt our conclusions. The resulting practices will conflict with traditional goals and principles. We’ll make philosophical, religious, and economic objections.

But it will also not be impossible. Rather than getting lost in politics, culture, and religion, any debates will be grounded in deep agreement—in the values of life itself, and the need to both protect and expand it. This alone could dramatically improve the technological discourse.

We can easily dismiss some traditional hangups, like the **natural fallacy**—that all things _natural_ are by definition _good_. The entire idea is that _nothing_ in nature is eternally good because evolution itself is _constantly evolving_. The principles of life are bigger than any single moment in nature’s history.

For example, _natural_ evolution had to rely on mass pain and death—the crudest tools at its disposal—to bootstrap life through countless iterations of random experiments. But the broader principle isn’t about pain and death, it’s about variation and selection. 

As stewards of life, our role is to seek practices that best implement these broader principles. Pain and death will never be removed from the human condition, but an intentional and _conscious_ evolution should find more efficient and elegant practices to fulfill the broader principles of variation and selection.

Besides, the goal isn’t to solve every philosophical dilemma. The goal is to situate technology within the larger _story of life_, to unite technology around a singular purpose, and to align technology with what life needs to flourish.

### In summary

You are not a machine, or a computer, or an algorithm. You are a unique manifestation of the most precious thing in the universe—life itself. You are endowed with desires, agency, and a boundless imagination.

Technology comes from this same imagination—humanity’s greatest superpower—just like art, philosophy, and science. Technology has transformed us into agents with the power to evolve evolution.

As life’s most complex achievement, it is our responsibility to use the entirety of our imaginations as stewards of all life, both on Earth and beyond, both today and in perpetuity.

The wisdom to deploy technology in service of life depends on aligning our technological practices with the principles of life itself. 

Let’s stop accepting technology that deadens us. By reorienting technology to life, we can align technology with purpose worthy of its power. We can align it with the very source from which it springs, the boundless human imagination in all of its entirety.

We can align technology to empower our role as life’s stewards: to play the infinite game and to expand the possibilities of what life can be and become.

We can align technology with life itself.

—

Is this even possible? Are we wise enough to admit that something bigger is needed to guide our technology, or are we stuck? Do we have the collective will and intelligence to achieve something at this scale, or not? Do we still have the agency to define our own future, or is it too late? 

There is only one way to find out. We will need to run the experiment.

* * *