Balaji writes about the purpose of technology:

“If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.”

Hey ChatGPT, could we get a summary of his argument?

“The author argues that the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, which can be seen in how technological breakthroughs allow us to do more with less in both the digital and physical world. The author then makes the logical implication that the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality, as mortality is the main source of scarcity. If we had infinite time, speed and efficiency would be less valuable, and thus, life extension is the most important thing we can invent.”

Cool… thanks. Truth be told, nineteen-year-old me would’ve jumped in support of this line of argument, but three years later, I find myself more critical of arguments that reduce all of human activity to economic productivity. Admittedly, Balaji’s premise is sound as much of technology has been geared towards the reduction of scarcity. The neolithic agricultural revolution reduced food scarcity. The industrial revolution reduced the scarcity of manufactured goods. The digital revolution reduced the scarcity of information (whether accurate or not is debatable).

However Balaji’s definition of scarcity is strange. He says “with new technology, one can do more with less” linking reduced scarcity to efficiency, rather than the abundance of resources. But any post-scarcity vision built on increased production efficiency, must reckon with Jevons paradox- technological improvements in efficiency are often followed by an increase in consumption due to rising demand from falling costs. In other words, Jevons paradox explains that the invention of more efficient steam engines didn’t reduce the use of fossil fuels, but rather reduced the costs of travel, stimulating demand and counterintuitively increasing the use of fossil fuels.

Source: Our World In Data

By no means does this imply that progress is bad, humanity has achieved incredible abundance through technological innovation. But what we have gained is not entirely positive-sum. Bearing in mind our drain of resources from other communities, environments, and ecologies, whether human or not, is crucial for a complete picture of the global economy.

To Balaji, this premise implies immortality is the greatest good. He argues that for immortals, the speed of consumption is irrelevant because they have an eternity to do everything they want to do.

There are a number of problems with this line of thinking, first and foremost being that speed is only one side of the “production efficiency” coin. The other, arguably more important side is quantity. Perhaps, in an immortal future, I hold no care for my Amazon Prime “put-the-parcel-in-my-hand-the-moment-i-think-about-it” subscription. But immortal me still cares about the volume of consumed goods, especially when the goods are essential like food and water.

This leads to my second point which is Jevons paradox for an immortal humanity. An immortal, with zero time cost, has no issue spending time consuming things they might not otherwise find meaningful. A mortal has to choose their consumption, an immortal can have it all. With the fact that immortals live much longer, this would would mean an exponential growth in consumption which any increase in production efficiency would would find hard to match.

Add the lives of immortals to our existing population growth and you get a variant of the infamous Malthusian trap where everyone is reduced to subsistence over competition for finite resources. This is doubly true when considering essentials like food, where the volume of consumed goods matters more than the speed.

Contrary to Balaji’s article, immortality seems to increase scarcity if anything. More broadly, in a finite world, with finite access to resources, post-scarcity is a pipe dream. However it could be argued that more people alive would mean more minds to invent technologies that increase absolute access to resources rather than efficiency (think asteroid mining, or agriculture on Ganymede). This is self-defeating, in this world view immortality is simply a means to obtain technology which opens access to more resources. If technology’s ultimate purpose is immortality, then it must cease to be useful post mortality.