The Ultimate Purpose of Technology

What should we be striving towards? What is it all for?

I consider myself lucky that I get to work on some very cool space technology every day at Pixxel. Given the cutting edge nature of the work that it entails, more often than not, it gets me dreaming about how space technology can help us get to a Type II civilization status quickly. And those reveries unfailingly get me thinking about what the ultimate purpose of technology itself is.

What are we working towards? What is it all for?

To answer that, we first need to understand what technology is. Technology, for me, is humankind’s way of interacting with the universe and shaping it as we see fit (within physical limits, of course). Technology is a tool that life uses to create dents in the universe. It is a tool life uses “to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes… with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.”¹

The ultimate purpose of technology then becomes whatever the ultimate purpose of life (humanity/post-humanity) is, since technology is but a tool towards achieving that purpose.

Some time ago, I read Balaji Srinivisan’s article on “The Purpose of Technology” in which he says,

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

Although I agree that eliminating mortality is the right and worthy goal to strive towards and might even be the ultimate goal to chase this century, I disagree that it is the ultimate purpose of technology and thereby humanity. When we think beyond our lifetime and the immediate following generations, it is nowhere close to being the ultimate purpose. Eliminating mortality would be but one pathway towards achieving our ultimate purpose.

Here’s how I think about it:

1. The very proximate purpose of technology would be to reduce scarcity.

2. The proximate purpose of technology would be to eliminate mortality.

3. The long-term purpose of technology would be to create a post-scarcity world - a utopia.

But the ultimate purpose of technology, I think, is “to figure out what the end state of the universe is, and to work towards avoiding that fate.”

In the next few years, an asteroid could come streaking towards the earth leading to the annihilation of all life as we know it. Or a Gamma Ray Burst (GMB) could lead to our planet becoming uninhabitable for any and all life. Or a massive cosmic event in the vicinity of our spiral arm of the galaxy could decimate our sun and all its planets. Or in about 4.5 billion years, the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies could uproot our solar system as we know it, disrupting the delicate balance of life that exists.

(Let us not let these scenarios alarm us. The likelihood of any of these affecting Earth and the solar system are very miniscule. However, they aren’t zero either.)

A simulated animation of the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, slated to happen around 4.5 billion years from now.

If we do end up surviving all that by becoming interplanetary and eventually interstellar, we would still have to face uncertainties such as the probable heat death of our universe.

And it is the purpose of technology to get us out of these problems that would lead to the end of life. Our hedge against an asteroid strike is to become multiplanetary. Our hedge against the uprooting of our solar system is to become interstellar. Our hedge against destructive cosmic events is stellar engineering. Our hedge for eventual survival is to figure out what the end state of the universe and to make sure we (intelligent life) continue to survive and thrive.

It is life’s creative ingenuity in its pursuit for survival, through the use of the medium we call technology, that will sustain life.

Now I get that this is so far out in the future, that it isn’t of any immediate concern to us. Why bother about something that will only happen billions or even trillions of years down the line? I cannot answer this objectively, but it is important to me because the steps that we take today will be crucial to achieving that ultimate purpose. The dominos we topple today will lead to the falling of the final domino that will help us arrest the universe’s journey towards its ultimate fate.

If we do end up conquering mortality, the long timelines might become a little more palatable. But still not enough to be of immediate concern. But what we are talking about here is the “ultimate” goal. And ultimate means final which doesn’t concern itself with the notion of time.

Technology and Progress

We started at the end of the universe and then looked back from there to ponder what the ultimate purpose of technology is. Another way is to look at the use of technology now and extrapolate it to the end.

What gives us (life) purpose is our continuous pursuit for progress.² It isn’t enough for life to be stagnant where it is. It isn’t enough for us humans to be stagnant where we are today. We have always been explorers - ever curious to push our boundaries. We need progress to make life better for all humanity. We need progress to make us all happier. We need progress to obtain more knowledge about the world and the universe around us. The knowledge we so obtain in the process will further lead us to faster progress which will lead us to more knowledge ad infinitum. How is this progress possible? Through the use of technology that enables us to act on the knowledge we have, generating more knowledge in the process.

A diagram by David Boghossian on David Deutsch’s explanation where our knowledge approaches but never arrives at complete explanations of the reality around us. And hence our progress towards complete understanding will continue till infinity.

And what makes this progress of humanity inevitable? Renowned physicist David Deutsch says (and I tend to agree) that it is our continuous endeavor for better and better explanations of this world around us. It is this striving for better explanations and thereby the knowledge we obtain in the process that has consistently led to our progress. All the way from the stone age to today - an era of semi-abundance we live in.

The universe around us is beautiful, vast, and unbounded. And hence knowledge of this universe is beautiful, vast and unbounded. And it is this ever growing repertoire of explanations and knowledge that will enable us to manipulate the universe around us, according to our wishes, through the only general purpose tool we know how and have - technology.

To ensure there is a continuous progress towards more and more knowledge about the universe, it will become imperative at some point that the knowledge that we will need (and will strive towards) is the one that enables us to arrest the cessation of all knowledge. This ceasing of all knowledge could be due to the heat death of our universe or whatever else the ultimate state is - that remains to be found out.

With continuous progress, we will eventually reach a point with our understanding of the world and the technological capabilities we possess, where we can simulate entire universes (or parts of it) all the way till their end states and see how that plays out.

So step one: obtain explanations and knowledge about what the end state of the universe is through the use of technology to tune our understanding of the world better.

Step two: use technology to solve this problem of the ultimate fate of the universe. That could be building a separate universe within our universe, building a separate universe outside of this universe, or traversing to a parallel universe within this probable multiverse that we live in. We are entering the realm of fantasy without proper tested theories to back any of it up, here. But we’ll find out - if not now, in the eons to come.

Closing Thoughts

One of the other catalysts that has led to my pondering over the ultimate purpose of technology was Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Last Question”. I read the story first a few years ago while I was in college. When I first read it, it was one of the most mind blowing things I’d ever read. The sheer scale of thought and imagination was breathtaking. The story concerns itself with the following question: How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased? In other words, how to avoid the ultimate fate of the universe which the story assumes to be the heat death of the universe?

The characters in “The Last Question” put Multivac (a supercomputer) on a task to find the answer for how the net entropy of the universe could be massively decreased. Multivac’s initial answer - “Insufficient data for meaningful answer.”

The story uses technology to help us get there. To first understand what this end state will look like. And then how to arrest the universe’s constant push towards that end state. I will not reveal anything further lest I spoil it. Read the story for yourself - you won’t regret it.

And that is what we’ll need to do as well. We need to continuously find better and better explanations of this fantastically weird world around us. We need to use technology to test those explanations for validity and then use the knowledge obtained in the process to perpetually keep on making life better and expand our horizons. But more importantly, we need to use technology to help us push the boundaries of what we can see, measure, manipulate and understand of this universe around us so that we can understand the actual fabric of reality we live in.³

And in that process, in a few thousands or millions of years, we will hopefully reach a level of technological expertise where we ourselves can choreograph the cosmic events of the universe, bend it to our will and avoid the ultimate fate.

Because what is life if not the universe itself? Life is the universe’s way giving itself a semblance of order from chaos - of trying to understand itself. And technology’s purpose, I think, is to give the universe (and as an extension, ourselves) the means to better understand itself and the capability to shape reality as we see fit. And the ultimate nature of that purpose becomes to figure out the end state of the universe, and to avoid that fate.

1. Quote by author Jonathan Franzen.

2. This leads us to question: Is life itself a byproduct of the universe’s continuous pursuit of progress?

3. By this I do not mean that we pour all of our resources towards this goal today. There will of course need to be a balance in the utilization of resources to make all life better now and here and our long term quest to understand and shape the world around us. It does not have to be an “either-or” situation.