Towards a more Elvish vision of technology

There are at least two kinds of magic. The first, which we shall call “Human,” is driven by the desire to extend one’s power over the world while minimizing one’s dependence on it. The second, which we shall call “Elvish,” is driven by the desire to extend one’s understanding of the world while minimizing one’s interference with it. For most of history, we have been obsessed with the first kind.

The Human magic of conquest and control has many names, but today we call it “technology.” It is our shield from nature and our axe to subdue it. Its patron saint is Prometheus, who stole fire for mortals. Its guiding principle was articulated by J.R.R. Tolkien, who saw “Magic” and “Machine” as interchangeable so long as the motive was “the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective.” A decade later, Arthur C. Clarke cemented this program for generations of engineers: “Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The goal was clear: build machinery to make human will so instantly effective that the world’s friction disappears. But when you remove all friction from a system, you also remove its power.

One can view the whole history of civilization as a story of increasing our insulation from nature. Technology is humanity’s fur. We learned to control light, pain, heat, and energy, achieving a significant degree of independence from our environment—or so we thought. For the less we depend on nature, the more we depend on technology itself. The final unconquered entity is death. Mastering death has been the ultimate quest for practitioners of Human magic, from the first Emperor of China drinking his fatal elixir of immortality to the modern biohacker trying to break the Hayflick limit. This is the magic of mortals: searching for power that can conquer death, and, almost inevitably, creating more death along the way.

But what if death was not a problem? What technologies would immortals be interested in? This is the realm of Elvish magic.

If for Humans “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” then for the Elves, “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” Their goal is not conquest, but harmony. Not control, but understanding. This is not biomimicry—imitating nature’s forms. It is letting nature do the work. The Elves do not build a dam; they listen to the river and gently guide its course over centuries. Allowing nature to solve a problem is extraordinarily effective. The only downside is that it usually takes a lot of time—precisely the thing that immortals have in abundance.

Give it enough time, and every problem will solve itself. This may not always be a practical strategy for a mortal, but it doesn’t mean we must always go to the other extreme. Solving a problem instantly requires an infinite amount of energy and creates an unthinkable number of side-effects. The Human approach is to adapt the world to our predictions. The Elvish approach is to adapt our predictions to the world. This second strategy may sound passive, but it isn’t. Allowing the problem to solve itself is frowned upon by most humans, who are obsessed with their own sense of agency. “And what did you do?” we ask. “How did you save the world?” Everyone wants to be the hero. But Hesse’s Siddhartha wasn’t joking when he said that all he can do is “think, wait, and fast,” and that it is enough to accomplish almost anything. Slow is good, not just because it takes less effort, but because it achieves what it was meant to achieve without breaking the world in the process.

So, must we choose between these two paths? Between the Human magic of world-amputation and the Elvish magic of self-amputation? Perhaps not. Perhaps a middle path is possible. But to walk it, we must reimagine our entire approach to problem-solving. This shift would give birth to a new method. Three features come to mind.

First, the outcome is not a state, but a process. As mortals, we are used to time-bound problems. The problem: you have nowhere to live. The task: build a house. The outcome: the house is built. Job done. An Elvish paradigm asks: How will this house grow? How will it decay? What will happen to the earth beneath it? This isn’t a philosophical exercise. Knowing how a house plugs into the pattern of your life—and the life of the planet—helps you build a better house. Adopting an agricultural metaphor can help: what if instead of building houses, we grew them?

Second, resources are not materials, but agents. We are used to throwing resources at problems: money, people, concrete. We think of them as passive materials to be applied. But from an Elvish point of view, there is no such thing as a passive resource. There are no materials, only agents. Money, thrown at a problem, doesn’t just solve it; it changes the people around it. New people, dropped into an organization, create their own adaptations. Even a block of concrete has a mind of its own: it will stand there forever, inviting mold, influencing the aesthetic of a place, putting people in a certain mood. When you solve with materials, you think about their qualities. When you solve with agents, you think about their behaviors over time. You don’t ask, “What is this thing?” You ask, “What does this agent want to do?”

Third, information is not just an input, but an output. We learn so that we can act. But the relationship is symmetrical: we also act so that we can learn. How often do we design projects not just for their expected outcomes, but for their expected learnings? Every intervention in the world is an experiment, and the data it produces is as valuable as the result it achieves.

This sketch of an Elvish vision for technology is not a call to abandon our tools. It is a call to rebalance our practice of magic. Our Human magic is leading us to its logical conclusion of world-amputation at a terrifying pace. More importantly, our approach must change because we have changed. Our lifespans have expanded. Our powers of understanding have grown. We are becoming more like the Elves.

As Konrad Lorenz noted, when a species develops a weapon that can destroy a fellow member at one blow, it must also develop a social inhibition to prevent its use. This applies to all technologies. The explosion of our power must be matched by a shift in our paradigm. If we are turning into gods, we have to get good at it. This should not wait until we become immortal. In fact, the first step to becoming truly immortal is to start acting as if we already were.