Towards a more Elvish vision of technology

There are at least two kinds of magic.

The first kind, which we'll call Human, is driven by the desire to extend one's power over the world while minimizing one's dependence on it. Its endpoint is world-amputation: the destruction of a world you no longer need.

The second kind, which we'll call Elvish, is driven by the desire to extend one's understanding of the world while minimizing one's interference with it. Its endpoint is self-amputation: the dissolution of the self into the world.

We've been practicing the first kind for a very long time. Today we call it technology, and we use it as both a shield against nature and an axe to cut it down to size. In the 1950s 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 wrote a job description for three generations of engineers: build machinery that makes human will so quickly effective that the constraints of the natural world cease to exist.

But nothing exists without its boundaries and its friction. Remove the world's friction and you remove the world's power. Then you remove the world.

Fire was the first act of Human magic — which is why Prometheus is its archetypal hero, and why his punishment was so severe. Since then we've conquered light, heat, pain, food, energy, information. Each conquest buys a little more insulation. Technology is humanity's fur.

The last uncontrollable thing is death. Mastering it has been the quest of Human magicians from the first Emperor of China — who died drinking what his alchemists swore was the elixir of immortality — to the biologists now trying to break the Hayflick limit. And our peculiar enthusiasm for killing each other may be a perverse consolation prize: if we cannot forbid death from coming to us, we can at least summon it for others and feel briefly like its master. Such is the magic of mortals: seeking the power to conquer death, and manufacturing more of it along the way.

But suppose death weren't a problem. What technology would immortals want?

Presumably they'd point their magic at the only thing unavailable to them — which is death, or more precisely, the dissolution of the self. If the mortal's endpoint is suicide by conquest, the immortal's is suicide by understanding. Deep understanding always implies self-amputation: either by making yourself an outside observer (the scientific way) or by realizing you were never separate in the first place (the spiritual way). When the dog discovers its Buddha nature, it stops being a dog.

Tolkien's Elves aren't enlightened, exactly. But understanding, beauty and harmony are what they want. They're in love with the world and its music, and their best strategy for helping it grow is 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: for Humans, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For Elves, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

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

Give it enough time and every problem solves itself. Solve it instantly and you need infinite energy and accept infinite side effects. Between those poles is a solution space we barely explore, because we've decided that letting the world fix itself doesn't count as fixing it. 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. Hesse's Siddhartha isn't joking when he says all he can do is think, wait, and fast — and that this is enough to accomplish almost anything.

The real question isn't whether to choose Human magic 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. Hope demands a middle path. So let's get pragmatic. What changes if we rebalance?

One: outcome is not a state, but a process.

You need somewhere to live next month. Build a house. Job done. But in the Elvish frame, the finished house is not the end. How will this building grow? What will it become when you no longer need it? 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? Asking this doesn't make you a philosopher instead of a homeowner. It makes you a better homeowner. It gets you a house that keeps having purpose after you're done with it. Swap the metaphor: what if we grew houses instead of building them?

Two: resources are not materials, but agents.

We throw resources at problems. How many people, how much concrete, how much money. We treat resources as objects — passive stuff we apply. But there is no passive resource. Money changes the people around it. A new hire makes their own friends and enemies and quietly rewrites the culture. Even concrete has a will: it stands there forever, invites mold, sets a mood. When you solve with materials you think about their qualities. When you solve with agents you think about their behaviors over time. What will this agent want? How will it interact in five years? What should we plant here so that, pursuing its own ends, it tilts the system where we want it to go?

Three: information is not just an input, but an output.

We gather understanding so we can act. But the relationship runs both ways: we act so we can learn. William James put it best — we must live and understand life alternately, as a pair of scissors cannot cut with a single blade. How often does a project have expected learnings alongside expected outcomes?

This sketch is neither complete nor detailed. But something has to change, because the current approach is reaching its logical conclusion faster than we notice — listen to how we talk about climate: we need to fix it, our target by 2050 — as though we were the only agent in the system.

And it must change because we have changed. Our lifespans have stretched. Our powers of understanding have grown. We are becoming more Elvish whether we like it or not. Konrad Lorenz observed that when a species evolves a weapon that can kill a fellow member at one blow, it must simultaneously evolve a social inhibition against using it, or die. This is true of all technology, because all magic can be used as a weapon.

If we are turning into gods, we have to get good at it. And we shouldn't wait for immortality to start. The first step toward becoming immortal may be acting as though we already were.

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