Towards a more Elvish vision for Technology
essays.georgestrakhov.com
essays.georgestrakhov.com
Nature isn't kind to humans. Sure, we've acquired many of these elvish capabilities: we can live longer if we use fire to scare away hungry bears, we can heal faster if we have some bandages or build a hospital, we can travel fast if we sit in a vehicle. But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other.
So unless we someday genetically engineer ourselves to be more elf-like and resilient out in the forest, I don't think we'll ever adopt an Elvish outlook. We fundamentally improve ourselves via that which we create, and defend ourselves from the hostile environment which existed before us. In fantasy everyone's made by a benevolent creator, in reality we've evolved under the rule of survival of the fittest. The elves didn't dominate their environment because they didn't need to.
(PS: In Tolkien, there actually is someone who's out of harmony with the natural order from day one, and has to go engineer his own world as a response. Complete with orcs and trolls and enormous fortresses that keep nature out. He's known as Morgoth and when they finally catch up with him they throw him in eternal jail!)
The problem is that we much prefer convenience now in our comparatively short personal lives than thinking about the long-term consequences. The view that our relationship is with tech rather than the world and the view of the world as basically a negative thing is a strong part of that.
Humanity has spent much more of its time on earth living with a very low technology level than that we enjoy today. If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech. Tolkien's works were very much about the 'war' between the pre- and post- industrial revolution worlds. Hint: the bad guys are the industrialists (Morgoth being one example).
It’s a mistake to view nature as “good” and technology as “bad”. The only similarity between them is their complete and utter moral neutrality.
Only a few of your fellow humans care about you, for sure, and only your technology is fully disposed to your orders; nature does not want you here anymore than it wants you gone.
Anthropomorphizing nature is a good way to end up disappointed, it’s not a being - it’s a composition of very complex systems, to quantify its “kindness” is not possible.
Humanity as we know it, has always had an incredible technological advantage, even just fire is orders of magnitudes higher advantage than something evolution can give you in a similar timeframe. In fact it’s so powerful, the first technology, that it literally modified our evolution to give us larger brains and closer societies - in some respects highly developed language owes its existence to fire.
Every tree murders the Savannah below, every Savannah fire is a attempt to get back more land for the grass.
Nothing out there is peaceful, even with all hostile predators removed, the battle of each system component against the others continuous.
Something like 90% of Earth's surface is outright deadly to humans: about 71% is covered in water, in which humans cannot survive; then there's deserts (both hot and cold) as well as high mountains, which also don't allow for human habitation without technology.
But it's not just geological features. There's also deadly diseases, lots of predators (humans wiped them out completely in most of their habitats), weather and poisonous plants.
The average urban human wouldn't survive long in nature. Heck, there's a good chance they would catch a serious disease just from drinking contaminated water from a pond or a small brook.
> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
For hundreds of thousands of years there's only been very few of us. In pre-argicultural times, no more than 10M humans lived on the planet [0], probably even almost going extinct in the wake of the Toba supervolcano event 70000 years ago. Indeed several genetic bottleneck events have been identified (ice age, weird cultural shifts [1]) suggesting that the survival of our species wasn't a sure bet throughout history.
[0] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/internat...
So it really is a complex system of adaptation to external conditions, modifying inanimate aspects of the environment to meet our needs and interactions with other species.
Human technology and -activity is not unmatched in scale (cyanobacteria are still the champions - completely remodelling Earth's atmosphere), but no other other species had the means to do it so quickly. We seem to strife for a mixture of artificial (houses, streets, technology) and versions of nature that we're fully in control of (from fish tanks and zoos to parks and gardens).
This need to "tame the land" even extends to other parts of the universe, hence the concept of "terraforming", even though adaption even if by artificial means would be much less complicated, quicker and "more natural".
No buffalo walks up to a lion and gives itself up, the lion evolved to take, brutally and with often needless cruelty.
The majority of humans died. Sometimes almost to the point of extinction. The ones who got lucky or got the right genes survived at least long enough to pass their DNA on to the next generation. Which is the one thing natural selection optimizes for. When you say "we" made it across hundreds of millennia, you're excluding the countless evolutionary dead ends that far outnumber the rest.
Nature isn't kind to us, and we aren't immune to many of its dangers because on average it's not enough to kill us before we can create offspring.
We rely on technology to handle the rest. Like avoiding sickness because even when not deadly it's not pleasant.
"Tech" is a fairly undefined word, and we subconsciously draw lines where it makes sense / suits us. I will however postulate that:
1. Yes, humans spent a lot of time without technology; but it sucked and we died and suffered a lot
2. Technology isn't just iPhones - it's fire and clothes and clean water and toilets.
I don't know if this is a self-evident or hugely controversial or even politically incorrect thought, but hoping I'm in safe-enough space to explore it: I wonder how much of very definition of "human/humanity" has to do with tools we use.
Some thrived, but a lot did not. Humans were down to a tiny population at one point.
And low-tech is still tech. Fire, tools, pots, and agriculture are all ways to overcome nature.
Men are culturally diverse and capable of building great cities and societies. We are adaptable, industrious, but not particularly loyal. We tend to be fearful and vengeful. We don't form a symbiotic relationship with the land (Elves) or have a single-overarching purpose to acquire wealth (Dwarves). We conquer our natural environment and bend it to our will as best we can.
The Elves and Dwarves are very one-dimensional in Tolkien's work and they sort of represent specific things.
We are all humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, goblins, orcs, whatever, each race just highlights one of the facets of complex human society and behaviors.
But humans are a small element of nature. They originated from this environment, live within it, return to it.
We are from nature, and every one of us is thus destined to die, most likely painfully, and our deaths will most definitely inflict pain to other members of our species. Until we can bridge this gap, be no longer bound by the short lifespans we have, humans and nature will remain enemies.
Only after the gap is closed, there can be talk of peace - and then, still, we will need to become immune to nature's other trappings, because most of humanity can't survive in a purely natural environment anymore. Once heat, cold, pathogens in water and hungry predators stop being a threat, we can finally start living in respectful symbiosis with the natural world.
Alternatively, we could just learn to abandon all our morality: stop caring about suffering and death, treat ourselves and each others as just an ephemeral phenomenon, appearing one moment, gone in another. I don't think any one of us is ready to go to that extreme, and it would require extreme degree of self-lobotomizing anyway. Our survival instincts and our capacity for empathy are built into our firmware, we can't just shut them off for the sake of "being one with nature".
Nature is not "an enemy", it's where you're coming from and what you're made of and what you're living in.
It's something to deal with, for sure. However treating nature as "the enemy" is precisely the model of thinking that brought us here and now, on the verge of being erased by the consequences of our own actions, human-as-a-conquerer.
Before talking of nature's trappings, we might as well better talk about human's owns. Our survival instinct saved us within a specific frame in which we could act. When our whole biome disappears or stops working for us, being part and dependent of it, we disappear as well.
Well done. That's a Tolkien Elf. They are immortal, which is the first part of your declaration. Yet they are not immune to "natures other trappings", rather they are more resistant to it, but it seems that crucially, this is not viewn as a threat. This may be due to elves having less selfish natures than humans and more willing to "become part of nature". So it turns out having the right mindset (or nature) is also important. Also, Tolkien elves care deeply about their own kind, so i'm not sure how to reconcile that with what i just said.
In any event, it's technology that will make us more elvish. When we choose so, and some people will. It's also technology that will give us access to huge amounts of energy without destroying nature and it is technology which will allow is to live out in space leaving our original world as pristine as it can be.
If you ask me this piece is about optimism vs pessimism wrt technology.
One for beauty, one for immortality, one for grace, one for safety...
With enough force-fields, delicately interwoven with the art of the mind of a god and the skill of the hands of a god, who is to say that the gap between the humans and elves is anything other than a sheet of silicon?
He expanded this to "Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony" [1]
[1](pdf warning) https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Ambassador.pdf
The same inflection point is reached in Diamond Age when technology advances sufficiently to allow for "seed" tech to displace "feed" tech.
Nature isn't kind to anything. I completely agree with you, but that needs to be said better since the root concept here is how humans, but nothing else, has fallen out of line with nature. Bullshit. Yea, it's pretty to see a monarch butterfly and how peaceful it must be... except it's probably the lone survivor of its swarm after a flock of swallows decimated all the other butterflies it was with just 20 minutes ago. Animals and plants went extinct pre-humans. All. The. Time. They get slaughtered or diseased without us.
The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives. I mean, for fuck's sake, we're such assholes about it, we setup animal sanctuaries and clinics to rescue wild, injured animals. Any other form of nature would have called it "lunch".
I'm going onto a soapbox now. I blame modern animal/nature shows for this gradual misunderstanding of "nature". If you're old enough, you remember old school nature programs showed how metal, destructive and viscous wildlife actually IS. All the shows I see my nieces and nephews watch... they haven't watched footage of a bear tearing into a still kicking deer or wolves taking down a screaming baby bison or moose. They need to know if they see a bear, wolf, snake or cougar in real life, it's not going to be cuddly or do a song/dance number. It's going to fuck them up and they need to keep their distance. Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas deserve to go extinct. Mono-food source creatures are asking for trouble and need to evolve to diversify their diet to properly outpace extinction.
I mean, there's water, nutrients in the soil and the importance of mycelium in the dirt. Most plants you can throw in a dark closest for like a week or two easy, then take them out and they'll come back to life. Don't forget, ground level plants in a forest or jungle barely get shit for sun. I'm a cheap bastard that buys "dying" clearance plants from Lowes and Home Depot, then bring them back to life. My dumb redneck green thumb has a lot more respect for plants.
Shit, watch some wild bonsai collectors on youtube. They massacre small trees to bare wood, purposely put them in too small pots, under nourish them and the fuckers still grow.
Plants are no where near as fragile as a koala and panda. Hell, there was an oak tree on my parents property that was struck by lighting some ten some odd times in a five year period (Florida). We cut it down to a 2 or so foot stump since it seemed too dangerous to keep up with all the damage. Fucker started brand new shoots and refused to accept death. After 10 years from cutting, it grew three solid trunks about 10 feet high or so. A bit taller than a house, never measured it.
"There's no *deserve*.... Why are you throwing morality at this?" -Fern_Blossom, current comment
This was an exercise in friendly ribbing. I think we should save the koalas and the pandas, if we can. We've destroyed enough already. And c'mon, they're cute.
Indeed, it's not kind to anything.
However, even by saying "no" to nature, we're still transforming it (or it transforms itself through its parts, of which we are one type) and part of it; we're not extracting us or whatever from it, in the long term.
There are wolves in the forest. They're not generally dangerous to humans, unless you're doing stupid things or you're child, but they're dangerous enough and they'll kill dogs.
Finding clean water is a challenge. Mosquito can turn your life into hell without modern repellents.
But still I think that it's a worthwhile movement to bend a nature towards human and fill a missing pieces. Because despite all the dangers and inconveniences I just love being in nature compared to the city.
Probably the technology and science is not here yet. But imagine that we develop ways to eradicate mosquitoes completely. Eradicate infected mites completely (issue with viruses and bacterias, not with mites, of course). Find a ways to generate clean energy (hardest thing is to generate heat in home, it requires lots of energy). And so on. My dream is to live like an elf in the forest, but without all the negative consequences. It's impossible or too costly atm, but I don't see it as impossible in principle.
https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/ji7j1k/south-park-god-d...
Lots of interesting viewpoints here, but i think this one's missing: We have a symbiotic relation with our technology, but we make the technology, there's room to adapt it to have a symbiotic (or at least sustainable) relationship with nature.
Both of these ideas seem based on the assumption that consciousness is separate from the material conditions which give rise to it. The classical philosophy of the stoics, that humans are the means by which the universe observes and understands itself, seems to resolve the dilemma.
If we subscribe to the philosophy that humans are both part of the natural world and are interested in understanding the natural world, this might lead us to conclude it is in our interest to pursue capital intensive advanced research projects such as building orbital telescopes or high energy super colliders to probe the deeper mysteries of the universe.
If that is the case, then it is self-evident that we also need to possess a large mastery over the environment in order to understand the environment, to pursue progress towards such ends in a sustainable and resilient manner. Household, industrial capital, shared infrastructure, and common environmental stocks have a physical cost of maintaining and replacing. A low surplus society which is incapable of generating a net product or economic surplus above the cost of maintaining itself or keeping its population from starving is not going to be able to sustainably fund such advanced projects.
So understanding the environment requires interacting with the environment and shaping it in a manner which maximizes our ability for future understanding.
Well, they need someone rich and mighty to create this environment they can thrive in - poor people usually don't hire employees.
I mean if I didn't have to worry about money I'd probably devote my life to some interesting distributed operating-system problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
I think that the people who are already creating stuff would continue to create stuff, just exactly what they create would change.
I'm less worried about who would advance our knowledge and thought and more worried about who would manage the garbage or grow the food.
Also, how easy it is to build a good school and hire good teachers if you all are poor? Such are the cases where an infusion of wealth can help.
Regarding handouts, ask whether those who receive food at soup kitchens, or free meals for their kids at school, find the practice useless.
I'm sure if given the option of an intervention that actually addressed the underlying causes of poverty (i.e. socialised housing, UBI, or so forth), they wouldn't choose the gift of soup
The poor need an environment where those with more wealth cannot influence the outcome of political processes irproportionally.
The poor need an environment where the invisible hand of the market is not the fiscal equivalent of a one-way-valve, where the "free" market is praised as long as the employee wont use their work as a bargaining chip.
A handout is when someone gives you something you are not entitled to of their own free will. They can stop giving it to you at any time. If you are reliant on handouts, you are at their mercy.
That's the difference. With an insurance contract you are entitled to a payout when the conditions are met because the insurance company agreed to that as part of the contract. The only things you are entitled to are yourself, whatever you can homestead with your labor from unclaimed land, and what others voluntarily agree to give you. Insurance payments and every other form of voluntary contract fall into this last category.
> A handout is when someone gives you something you are not entitled to of their own free will. They can stop giving it to you at any time.
"Social safety nets" are not something you are entitled to. The government grants or denies them of their own free will (albeit using others' money). They can be reduced or revoked at any time, or extra conditions can be imposed for claiming them, and you would have no grounds to sue for compensation over those changes, despite having paid taxes to fund prior payments to others.
A handout normally refers to some rich individual giving money to someone or of the kindness of their heart.
2) New guy is unlikely to succeed in a market where there's a natural monopoly already filled by someone else. I'm not going to try to start a competitor to facebook.
3) Entrenched businesses have an interest in eliminating competition. Sometimes this happens naturally (walmart can take advantage of economies of scale in a way that 'mom and pop' down the road can't), and sometimes they go out of their way to prevent competition (e.g. big telecom bribing politicians to pass rules against municipal internet).
The resulting trend being large companies become more and more powerful over time, making it more and more difficult for an outsider to compete. This should be plainly obvious to anyone living in the USA, but it's theoretically the case even under completely non-corrupt circumstances (see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...).
Therefore, no, I don't feel I could bring in 1000$ without them, but I am still being ripped off. The handout I give my employer is non-consensual.
Humans have a natural drive to be self sufficient, and it is unpleasant to rely upon the charity of others. We wish to be masters of our fate, not slaves.
Further, it is dumb to structure a society in a way that depends on significant numbers of its members routinely going against their own self interest.
I particularly liked: "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature".
I don't entirely agree that nature is efficient by our definition of the word. It takes A LOT of wrong turns, it's just that it has infinite time to correct them.
A side note on the CSS of your site: I found the text entirely too dense. I had to zoom in to 175% and then go into the CSS and manually change the line-height from 1.15 to 2 to make the text readable. (And I've OK vision.)
...but yes, it was also rather heavy on the eyes on my 4K display.
Also sorry for the css and readability. I just used the default Google docs html export formatting which is a bit shit... Will try to get something better next time.
Are you familiar with reader mode by the way? In Firefox it is available via an icon that resembles a text document in the address bar (or if it is stubborn and does not show the button, by directly going to about:reader?url= + the url you want to view). The customizations are available from an unobtrusive menu on the page and include font-size, line height, serifs or not and light, dark and a sepia mode.
Yeast, Chickens, and Dogs are the most developed technologies we have. (Brassica oleracea gets a runner up) Everything else we have is an unsustainable fad by comparison. Should something even count as technology if it can't reproduce almost without bound in the care of the average person? (settlements and factories count as reproducing technology!). I worry that production of computers is too complex and requiring of rare resources to be long term sustainable, but then I think the same of everything invented past the Bronze Age.
Oh wow this checks out -- there's a entire wikipedia article about it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemical_elixir_pois...
>"In Chinese alchemy, elixir poisoning refers to the toxic effects from elixirs of immortality that contained metals and minerals such as mercury and arsenic. The official Twenty-Four Histories record numerous Chinese emperors, nobles, and officials who died from taking elixirs in order to prolong their lifespans. The first emperor to die from elixir poisoning was likely Qin Shi Huang (d. 210 BCE) and the last was Yongzheng (d. 1735 AD). Despite common knowledge that immortality potions could be deadly, fangshi and Daoist alchemists continued the elixir-making practice for two millennia."
The author hints at them twice though, but very lightly:
> Both kinds of magic are partially known to humans [...]
and
> Humans (at least, us in the modern West) are obsessed with their own sense of agency.
I'm personally about as far from "indigenous" as can be, but from what I've learned through various readings & watching interviews, the idea of "becoming one with" or "being inseparable from" ones surroundings is very much part of many indigenous peoples' lives. Not to romanticize them, but this angle could really serve as a reminder in this particular discussion: the "elvish" notion of thinking is not limited to the fantasy world; some of it is very much anchored in real humans' world views.
And now, California suffers from massive wildfires every year (worsened, of course, by climate change). Essentially, modern Californians are living in a sort of post-apocalypse, suffering from ancient technology run amok, which they do not understand and so which afflicts them with impunity.
Maybe trees are the real elves - naturally long lives, incredible technology/magic that we barely understand, if we see it at all (e.g. mycorrhizal networks between trees [1]), adaptation and harmony with their environment, etc. The Overstory by Richard Powers is a wonderful exploration of this idea in fiction.
[1] https://www.nationalforests.org/blog/underground-mycorrhizal...
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.(As per, I suppose the machines' conception of grace is important in this regard.)
It likens “Human” and “Elvish” as to the degree of interference with the world, as if interference is the only way to interact with the world. But I do not think that human “interference” is the issue. Rather, it is the worldview in which we come to this dichotomy that is the problem.
That worldview is one where the world is understood in terms of inert, non-living mechanisms. That things happen from clear causal chains. That actions undertaken to change something in the system are forces to act upon components within that system.
So of course, from that worldview, the only way _not_ to unduly interfere is by withdrawing actions that perturbs the system.
However, this is not the only worldview. In a different worldview, the world is comprised of living systems. The whole cosmos is alive, as are every human, animal, plants, organization, polity, etc. Living systems are wholes unto themselves, capable of growing on their own, adapting, participating in their ecosystem (which in turn forms a greater living system).
Change doesn’t occur by applying force into a component within a dead, mechanical system. Rather, changes already happens within the living system because it is inherently capable of change and growth. Rather, improvements come in the form of helping the living system to grow and participate in its unique niche within the ecosystem.
Within a living systems world view, technology is either synergistically a part of a living system, or it is itself a living system. It is not something separate from the ecosystem.
From this worldview, there is no such dichotomy of “Human” vs “Elvish”, or even a notion of minimizing “interference”. Rather, it is living systems participating within and contributing towards an ecosystem.
This is drawn mainly from Carol Sanford’s work on regenerative paradigms and living systems worldview. Most of her work is applied towards business organizations, but it is applicable to technology’s place in our civilization.
Overall, the whole piece gave me quite systems thinking vibes. For example, this part (well, and also the other 2 of the "three high-level features" the author lays out) towards the end:
> But in a more “Elvish” paradigm, however, the moment the house is built is not the end. How will this building grow? What other purposes will it satisfy in the future? When and how will it be deconstructed? What would happen with the earth on which it is built? All these “Elvish” questions[20] (and many more) can help develop a deeper understanding of both the problem and the solution spaces, and reframe (re-timeframe) both. The moment when the house is needed is not the end, but it is also not the beginning. How did the need for the house emerge? Where did the materials for it come from?
Edit:
actually, on second read this hits so close it's almost spooky:
> the relationship between action and understanding is more symmetrical: we act so that we can learn, as much as we learn so that we can act
I've lost the count how many times I've had the discussion in my organization lately about "starting the implementation already so that we can learn more, as currently we know less about the problem than we will ever know".
Granted, to maximize learning there must be some, usually non-trivial amount of effort at understanding and learning before the initial direction is sufficiently correct for the "act" part to provide actual learning and insight. But in my experience that's most of the time much easier to achieve than one would initially think. The amount of effort also tends to scale rather well with experience, so more experienced engineers are able to start acting into the broadly right direction with much smaller initial effort (which, in essence, is probably the definition of "experience").
You learn chess by playing chess. You learn riding by riding. You learn from mistakes when you learn by doing. But you can also learn by listening to a teacher or reading a book.
So perhaps the big dichotomy is self-acquired-learning vs. passed-on-learning.
Were you immortal, or at least in a timeframe of thousands of years, this is going to happen often. "Don't be attached to outcome" or "just stay in oneness with everything" feels like philosophical cop-outs here. Is it possible for such a mind to exist that can stoically shrug off everything for thousands of years?
That's the Human-centric way of thinking as described in the essay, where you care about the outcome of the solution - "having a house as shelter".
If you care about the understanding, then seeing how natural processes reclaim everything will increase the knowledge on the mechanisms of nature, so it feeds the "elvish" side of solutions/magic.
Also, our models, no matter how accurate, tend to exhibit butterfly effect and can't account for external influences. These can swamp out minor interventions.
Yes. Because we have finite lifespans. We do things for a reason. To suggest anything else is pure philosophical wankery.
So maybe it's time to start thinking long term?
1. whether human mind would remain stable on such timescales, or how to alter it
2. whether elven approach to nature as described is feasible and sustainable and how (separately from eternal life considerations)
What sites are good for discovering this type of content?
Dare I say, portraying this as a one or the other, to follow the authors analogy, a "human" way of thinking about this. It doesn't have to be a this vs that narrative. We can pick and choose our optimizations. Not everything must be about power and purist intellectual pursuit. Where would a long term legacy focus while lowering of dependency lay? Or a long term desire to increase power, but reducing an impact on nature?
In an era where knowledge is power, how do you distinguish the two? Is a deep knowledge of the inner workings of nuclear science, or the biology of pathogens elvish?
Human lifespans exceed their ability to be rational leaders in touch with the modern world.
This article kind of starts thinking about that "moderation" bit in real-world terms.
"Power"/Agency/Technology vs. "Understanding"/Meaning/Purpose is definitely an interesting dynamic dichotomy/2x2 to explore.
Do nothing and nothing will be left undone.
p.s. Where "nothing" in above isn't absence of any things, but "what is not a thing" i.e. probably everything: https://web.archive.org/web/20190319105206/http://www.alangu...
here's to the people that see the first paragraph tilted thanks to the tilting of the initial plots ;P
here's to the people seeing the first paragraph tilted, illuded by tilting of the two first plots :)