Technology Alignment Political Compass

A Framing to Play With

Like all typologies, it’s not to be taken too seriously, but I thought this might spark some good discussion.

When a technology is a subject of popular discourse at all, you’ll tend to see “pro” and “anti” camps.

It gets more interesting when you subdivide into two axes instead of one.

One axis is “Real” vs “Fake.”

Does it work? Is it going to work soon? How powerful is it? How applicable is it to various possible uses? Is it on track to be a big deal?

Or is it underwhelming, overhyped, fundamentally infeasible, blocked by major challenges, stagnant, etc?

Another axis is “Good” vs “Bad.”

Would things be better, or worse, on the whole, if the tech succeeded wildly at its proposed purpose? Overall, do you want to live in a world transformed by it?

This gives us four quadrants:

• The Optimists think the tech is on track to work and it’ll be awesome.

• The Dystopians think the tech is on track to work all too well and to make the world a worse place.

• The Deflaters think the tech doesn’t work and is a bad idea anyway.

• The Strivers have the rarest position. They think the tech would be awesome if it were real but that we’re not at all on track to get there. Strivers think the prevailing paradigm is wrong and not going to work. Or they think there is a barrier ahead (natural or artificial) that’s going to stop progress. So something needs to radically change in order to get the awesome tech to happen.

Put more succinctly:

• Optimists: “It’s happening! Yay!”

• Dystopians: “Oh no! It’ll happen — unless we stop it!”

• Deflaters: “It’s not happening. (And who wants it anyway?)”

• Strivers: “It won’t happen unless we change something.”

You can think about factions in the discourse about specific tech areas in these terms.

AI

• The AI Optimists think AI is on track to be great (whether that means simple economic productivity gains or something more radically superhuman.)

• The AI Dystopians think AI is on track to create unprecedented disasters (human extinction or mass death events, eternal oppression, dehumanizing degradation, etc.) AI Risk goes here.

• The AI Deflaters think AI is snake oil that doesn’t work and won’t matter much, apart from wasting resources and distracting from real problems. AI Ethics goes here.

• The AI Striver position is that AI is a great mission that’s being approached all wrong and the real work has barely even begun.

  • I haven’t seen this so much with “AI” broadly, but in lots of AI-for-X subfields there are practitioners whose position is “AI-for-X would be great! Unfortunately existing models are not even close to doing the job, the real task is a long hard slog that virtually nobody is even trying to pursue.”

    • Eg for AI to transform manufacturing…you have to actually do the schlep of building models around real manufacturing data and automating formerly manual processes. ChatGPT can’t run your factory for you.

Biotech

• The Biotech Optimists think that lots of progress is being made towards healthier lives and this is great. They’re bullish about speculative future biotech like life extension, artificial wombs, cultured meat, and intelligence augmentation, and/or about present and near-future biotech like gene therapy, mRNA vaccines, and weight loss drugs.

  • Transhumanism goes here.

• The Biotech Dystopians think that “transhumanism” is a dirty word. They think technological meddling with natural biology is disturbing; maybe inherently immoral, maybe just ripe for exploitation by the untrustworthy.

  • “left-coded” worries about eugenics and immortal billionaires go here

  • as do “right-coded” worries about trans people and vaccines

  • and “bipartisan” worries about environmental toxins, over-medicalization, and predatory corporations

• The Biotech Deflaters think that “transhumanist” future biotech areas are mostly scams and fantasies. In the real world none of that stuff will happen, and there’s no point in hoping for it.

  • Most, though not nearly all, biomedical experts live in this zone.

    • Derek Lowe is a very rigorous, high-quality skeptic of the new hotness;

    • Science-Based Medicine is a somewhat more slanted example.

• The Biotech Strivers think that transhumanism would be awesome but in many cases nobody is doing what it would actually take to get there.

  • “Life extension is an important and ultimately achievable mission, but basically everyone in the aging field is pursuing a doomed approach” has been the SENS/Aubrey de Grey platform from the beginning;

  • From a very different perspective on aging research, Matt Kaeberlein performs the much-needed service of being the “call me when it works better than rapamycin” guy

  • “Brain emulation would be amazing but almost nobody is doing the requisite brain mapping project”

  • “Cognitive enhancement would be great but hardly any nootropics actually work”

  • “Cultured meat would be great but the efficiency of mammalian cell culture has to get way better to make it practical”

Clean Energy

• The Clean Energy Optimists are bullish on stuff like solar and EVs

• the Clean Energy Dystopians are the degrowthers, who think clean energy will work all too well at producing non-CO2-emitting power, which will be bad because what we actually need to do is reduce consumption

• The Clean Energy Deflaters are the skeptics of climate change mitigation, who think clean energy is impractical and we don’t need it anyway, fossil fuels are fine

• The Clean Energy Strivers think a transition to clean energy is not going to happen without a change that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, like way more energy storage or adoption of nuclear power…but we should very much try to make such a change!

As a general rule:

• Businesses, startups, and their fans are Optimists about their own industry, as are some DIY/hacker communities

• Popular fiction (books, TV, movies) and journalism leans Dystopian

• Academics and experienced professionals are often Deflaters, as are many “normal people” who don’t follow a topic closely

• Strivers don’t seem to have a clear constituency of any appreciable size; the Convergent Research ecosystem might be the closest thing I know of

Strivers and Rough Diamonds

As you might expect, I’m a Striver on a bunch of topics.

Not everything, of course. Any honest Striver should become an Optimist when something actually works or is on track to work. I’m an Optimist about mRNA vaccines, for instance.

And once in a while I think it also makes sense to take the Dystopian or Deflater stance. I’m sort of a Dystopian about food and entertainment being engineered to be addictive, for instance. And I tend to be a Deflater about educational tech — I don’t think most education especially needs or benefits from more computers.

But I don’t especially like writing about my Optimist, Dystopian, or Deflater takes.

Optimism tends to be a “cold take” that’s been expressed a million times; yes, I’m grateful for many modern technologies, but their efficacy isn’t really in doubt, and discussion of the value of modern technology is an exhausting cultural battleground.

I’m very cautious about expressing Dystopian views because the harm of freaking readers out about the state of the world often seems to exceed the benefit of alerting them to problems.

I’m also not usually interested in expressing Deflater takes, because when a field seems unfruitful or useless to me, I lose interest in the topic. I’m not enough of a fighter to enjoy sparring with “true believers” just for the joy of proving them wrong.

Part of the point of this blog is to focus on Striver-type insights — “in order to make this cool sci-fi future thing real, we’d have to actually do XYZ, and here’s what that might entail”.

An Optimist can source alpha for you — “this’ll be great, you should get in on the ground floor.” A Deflater can warn you to steer clear of bad bets, while a Dystopian can warn you of more drastic societal dangers.

But a Striver is the only one who can tell you how to make cool shit happen that wouldn’t happen by default.

Inter-Quadrant Dynamics

Strivers and Deflaters can often make common cause when it comes to calling out snake oil (or calming dystopian paranoia). A well-informed Deflater and Striver will agree when they’re talking about how distant the dream still is, or how the industry is full of fakers…the only difference is that the Striver still wants the dream to come true.

Strivers and Optimists are sometimes allied and sometimes in tension. The Optimists are often the only people “crazy” or “utopian” enough to appreciate the vision at all…and they can legitimize and grow the field. But from a Striver’s perspective, they’re often going about things all wrong. Is it good on net to have “allies” who seem to have their hearts in the right place but are over-credulous or aggressively promote slightly-wrong things? I have many uncertainties here.

Dystopians and Deflaters have incompatible beliefs (a tool can’t both not work and work all too well), so they can’t even locally agree on what present-day reality looks like, the way Strivers and Deflaters can. But you do see Dystopian/Deflater sociopolitical alliances around opposition to the tech and especially its fans the Optimists.

Dystopians and Optimists fight the most loudly and publicly of any two quadrants. Most of what you’ll see as a spectator to a tech discourse is Dystopian vs. Optimist beefing, with a distinct minority of Deflaters declaring that it’s all nonsense. But Dystopian/Optimist alliances do happen. “We’re forging ahead but addressing your concerns” is a Dystopian/Optimist sort of compromise.