Towards a more Elvish vision of technology

Two Kinds of Magic

There are two fundamentally different ways to wield power in this world. They look similar on the surface—both involve technology, intention, and the desire to change things. But dig deeper and you'll find they're moving in opposite directions, with radically different end games.

The first kind—call it "Human" magic—is about dominion. It's the drive to extend your power over the world while minimizing your dependence on it. You want to control nature, bend it to your will, insulate yourself from its demands. The ultimate destination? A world so thoroughly conquered and reshaped that you no longer need it. World-amputation. The destruction of everything you depended on, now rendered obsolete by your own mastery.

The second kind—"Elvish" magic—moves the opposite direction entirely. It's about understanding. You want to extend your comprehension of how the world works while minimizing how much you actually interfere with it. You want to help things grow, not by forcing them into your predetermined shape, but by getting out of the way and letting them become what they're meant to be. The ultimate destination? The dissolution of your separate self into something larger. Self-amputation. Becoming one with what you once tried to dominate.

The Long History of Human Conquest

J.R.R. Tolkien saw this clearly. In the 1950s, he noted that "Magic" and "Machine" were essentially the same thing—both expressions of "the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective." A decade later, Arthur C. Clarke crystallized it into law: "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." This became the marching orders for generations of engineers: build machines so powerful that the constraints of nature simply cease to matter.

And we've been remarkably successful. We learned to control fire, light, pain, heat, food, energy. We built insulation between ourselves and the natural world so thick that we could pretend it didn't exist. Technology became humanity's fur—our protection against a hostile environment.

But there's always been one enemy we couldn't quite conquer: death.

Death is the final frontier for practitioners of Human magic. From ancient Chinese emperors drinking mercury in search of immortality to modern researchers trying to break through the Hayflick limit, we've been obsessed with the ultimate conquest. And here's the uncomfortable truth: our obsession with killing others might be a twisted coping mechanism. If we can't master our own death, at least we can feel like masters of death by inflicting it on others when we choose. We create more death in our desperate attempt to conquer death itself.

What Would Immortals Want?

But imagine a different scenario. What if death wasn't a problem? What if you had infinite time?

Immortals, I suspect, would pursue the one thing eternally unavailable to them: their own dissolution. Just as mortals chase immortality, immortals would chase the complete dissolution of self. Deep understanding always implies self-amputation—either through becoming a detached observer (the scientific path) or through realizing complete interconnectedness with everything (the spiritual path).

Tolkien's Elves understood this. They weren't chasing power. They were chasing beauty, understanding, harmony. They loved the world and its music so much that their best strategy was to get out of the way and let it evolve. Their "fading" was actually the world's feeding. When the music's over, turn out the lights.

Here's the inversion: if for Humans "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," then for Elves, "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."

The Middle Path

The question isn't whether we should abandon Human magic for Elvish magic. The real question is whether we can find a middle way—a practice of magic that destroys neither the world nor ourselves.

If we're serious about this, we need to fundamentally rebalance how we solve problems. Three things would have to change:

First: Outcomes are processes, not endpoints. We're obsessed with finishing things. Build the house, declare victory, move on. But in an Elvish paradigm, the house is never finished. How will it grow? What will it become? When will it need to be deconstructed? Instead of building houses, what if we grew them? The same question applies to systems, software, societies.

Second: Resources are agents, not materials. When we throw money at a problem, we think we're just applying inert material. But money changes people. When we hire someone, they don't just work—they make friends, enemies, adaptations. They influence culture. Everything is active. Everything has agency. If we started treating resources as living agents with their own behaviors and desires, we'd solve problems differently. We'd ask: what will this person want to do in this system? How will they interact with others over time?

Third: Information flows both ways. We gather data before we act. But what if we also acted in order to learn? What if we tracked not just expected outcomes but expected learnings? The relationship between understanding and action isn't one-directional. It's a dance.

Why This Matters Now

We need this shift urgently. We're not just running out of time—we're running out of world. The current trajectory of Human magic leads to world-amputation at accelerating speed.

But here's the hopeful part: we're actually becoming more Elvish whether we realize it or not. Our lifespans have expanded. Our capacity for understanding has grown exponentially. We're closer to the Elves than we've ever been.

The question is whether we'll embrace it consciously or stumble into it by accident.

Konrad Lorenz observed that when a species develops a weapon powerful enough to destroy itself, it must simultaneously develop social inhibitions against using it. That applies to all technology. The explosion of our power demands an equal explosion in our wisdom.

If we're becoming gods, we'd better learn how to act like good ones. And the first step? Start acting as if we already were immortal. Because once you do—once you start thinking in terms of processes instead of endpoints, agents instead of materials, mutual learning instead of conquest—everything changes.

The world stops being something to conquer and starts being something to tend. And tending, it turns out, is the most powerful magic of all.