Towards a more Elvish vision of technology

For Gavin, 020210703

There are at least two kinds of magic. They can look identical from the outside. Their motives are opposite.

The first kind — call it Human — wants to extend your power over the world while minimizing your dependence on it. Its endpoint is world-amputation: the destruction of the world you no longer need.

The second kind — call it Elvish — wants to extend your understanding of the world while minimizing your interference with it. Its endpoint is self-amputation: the dissolution of the self into the world.

We call the first kind "technology." We use it as a shield against nature and as an axe to cut nature down to size. Tolkien used "Magic" and "Machine" interchangeably whenever the motive was "the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective." A decade later Arthur C. Clarke declared that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — and in doing so handed engineers their marching orders: build machinery that makes human will so instantly effective that the friction of the world disappears entirely.

But friction is the world. Remove enough of it and there's nothing left to push against. The strategies vary — robotic extensions, virtual-reality amputations, delivery in nine minutes — but the side effect is constant. To minimize the world's resistance, you must minimize the world.

Humans have been obsessed with this first kind since the beginning. Fire was the first act (Prometheus is the archetypal hero — note also his punishment for sharing the trick). Since then: light, heat, pain, food, energy, information. Technology is humanity's fur.

The last uncontrollable thing is death. Mastering it has been the eternal quest, from the first Emperor of China — who died drinking what his alchemists swore was the elixir of immortality — to today's researchers hunting for a way past the Hayflick limit. And our enthusiasm for inflicting death on others might be a coping mechanism: if we can't forbid death from coming to us, we can at least summon it for someone else and feel like its master. Such is the magic of mortals: seeking power over death, manufacturing more death along the way.

But what if death weren't a problem? What would immortals want?

Probably the same thing we want: the one thing unavailable. For us, immortality. For them, death — the dissolution of Self. So if mortals end in suicide-by-conquest, immortals end in suicide-by-understanding. Deep understanding always implies self-amputation: either you become the outside observer (the scientific route) or you realize you were never separate at all (the spiritual route). When the dog discovers its Buddha nature, it stops being a dog.

Tolkien's Elves aren't enlightened, exactly, but they want understanding, beauty, harmony. They're in love with the world and its music. Their strategy for helping the world grow is mostly getting out of the way. The fading of the Elves is the feeding of the world. When the music's over, turn out the lights.

So: if for Humans sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then for Elves sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

This isn't biomimicry. Elves don't imitate nature; they let nature do the work and try to help. Letting nature solve a problem is extraordinarily efficient. The only cost is time — precisely what immortals have in abundance.

Give it enough time and every problem solves itself. Not always practical for a mortal. But that doesn't mean we should sprint to the opposite extreme. Solving a problem instantly requires infinite energy and generates an unthinkable number of side effects. Fixating on speed and on our own agency collapses the solution space to almost nothing.

Two evolutionary strategies, then. The Human one minimizes surprise by bending the world to match your predictions. The Elvish one minimizes surprise by bending your predictions to match the world. The second sounds passive, defeatist. It isn't. But we don't count it as real solving. And what did you do? What was your role? How did you save the world? Everyone wants to save the world. Nobody wants to do it slowly, by letting the world save itself, even when that's the most effective route available. Hesse's Siddhartha isn't joking when he says all he can do is think, wait, and fast — and that it's enough for almost anything.

So the question isn't Human or Elvish. It's whether we must choose at all between perpetrating death and practicing it, between suicide by world-amputation and suicide by self-amputation. Can we practice magic in a way that destroys neither the world nor us? Hope demands a yes. Otherwise we're just picking which road to take to the same unpleasant destination.

What would rebalancing actually look like? Three features of a more Elvish method:

1. Outcome is a process, not a state. Problem: nowhere to live next month. Task: build house. Outcome: house built. Done. But the moment the house is finished isn't the end. How will the building grow? What else will it become? How will it be taken apart? What happens to the earth beneath it? And it isn't the beginning either — where did the need come from, where did the materials come from? Answering these makes a better house: one that doesn't lose its purpose when you no longer need it. Swap the metaphor from mechanical to agricultural. What if instead of building houses, we grew them?

2. Resources are agents, not materials. We throw money, people, concrete at problems. We're the subject; resources are the object. But there are no passive resources. Money changes the people around it. New hires make their own friends, enemies, adaptations, culture. Even concrete has a mind: it invites mold, it sets a mood, it stands there forever. When you solve with materials, you think about properties. When you solve with agents, you think about behaviors over time. What will this agent want? How will it interact in ten years? What should we plant here so that, pursuing its own ends, it tilts the system where we want it to go?

3. Information is an output, not just an input. We gather understanding so we can act. But the relationship is symmetrical: we act so we can learn, as much as we learn so we can act. How often do you plan a project's expected learnings rather than only its expected outcomes?

This sketch is incomplete. But it needs sketching, because the current approach is running toward world-amputation faster than we notice — and the bigger the problems we apply it to, the faster the spiral.

More importantly: we have changed. Our lifespans have expanded. Our powers of understanding have grown. We are becoming more Elvish, and our magic must evolve to match. As Konrad Lorenz observed, when a species develops a weapon that can kill a fellow member in one blow, it must simultaneously develop a social inhibition against using it — or perish. This applies to all technology, because any magic can be a weapon.

If we're turning into gods, we have to get good at it. And the first step to becoming immortal may be to start acting as though we already are.

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