The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

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• We believe growth is progress – leading to vitality, expansion of life, increasing knowledge, higher well being. We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all.”

• We agree with Paul Collier when he says, “Economic growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all

• Developed societies are depopulating all over the world, across cultures – the total human population may already be shrinking

• We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology.

• Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it.

• We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down

• markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty, and always have been

• We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes

• We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state.

• Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance

• We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure. Intelligence is the birthright of humanity; we should expand it as fully and broadly as we possibly can

• We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve. We

• We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well

• In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete US energy independence. Nixon was right; we didn’t build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to.

• We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power

• We believe a technologically stagnant society has limited energy at the cost of environmental ruin; a technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone

• We believe Andy Warhol was right when he said, “What's great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Same for the browser, the smartphone, the chatbot.

• Fuller: “Technology lets you do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing

• While not Utopian, we believe in what Brad DeLong terms “slouching toward Utopia” – doing the best fallen humanity can do, making things better as we go.

• We believe, as Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” And, “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”