← All writing Final · Oct 2025 · Updated Sep 2026

Technohumanism

Why abundance so often feels bad. Technology turns scarcity into abundance, abundance puts our environment out of step with our biology, and the lasting fix points toward transhumanism.

Introduction

We have never had more. More food, more medicine, more comfort, more ways to reach each other. And yet we are lonelier, heavier, more anxious, and less sure of our purpose than we should be. If technology has made life so abundant, why does it so often feel so bad?

This essay offers an explanation I call Technohumanism. It runs from our prehistoric past to a future that will sound like science fiction. In short: technology turns scarcity into abundance, abundance puts our environment out of step with our biology, and the only lasting fix for that mismatch is to change our biology. That last step is transhumanism. I hope the explanation brings some peace through understanding. Understanding is prediction, and I want to make the future feel a little more predictable and a little safer.

I don’t expect most readers to accept the conclusion. As I argued in Utility of Truth, minds rarely change because of a good argument. They change when their current beliefs stop working. So my aim is to plant a seed. If your picture of the future stops making sense someday, I hope this one is waiting.

1. Technology Turns Scarcity into Abundance

Something is scarce when there isn’t enough of it to go around. Money, time, and time with the people we love are all scarce. Economics is the study of how we manage scarcity. It does a fair job, but no one is satisfied with managing it. We want to end it. We never quite do: each abundance uncovers a new scarcity, as the next section shows. But each round leaves us better off.

Our prehistoric ancestors lived with scarcity of every kind. A cold season, a failed hunt, a disease, or a predator could wipe out a tribe. They weren’t content with sickness and death, and neither are we. They fought back with the one advantage evolution gave them: intelligence, turned into tools.

The history of technology is the history of that fight. Fire gave us more calories and safer food. Farming and domesticated animals gave us steady food supplies. Writing gave us memory beyond a single lifetime. Steam and electricity gave us energy beyond our muscles. Vaccines and antibiotics gave us protection from invisible killers. Computers and the internet gave us knowledge beyond any one mind.

Look across that history and a pattern appears: technology turns scarcity into abundance. Each invention answers a specific shortage.

Take medicine. The scarcity it fights is time: both how long we live and how well. In the limit, medicine is the fight against death, the ultimate source of time scarcity.

Try the exercise with any technology you like: name the shortage it answers. Seen this way, technology stops looking cold. Behind most inventions is someone watching a person they love suffer and wishing there were a way to help. The machines have no heart, but the reasons we build them do.

2. Abundance Creates Misalignment

If technology keeps giving us abundance, why doesn’t it feel better?

Because our bodies and minds were shaped for scarcity. Evolution tuned us for a world where food was hard to get, danger was close, and survival depended on the tribe. Abundance changes the environment faster than evolution can change us. The result is a misalignment: a mismatch between the world we live in and the one our biology expects.

Hunger shows it plainly. Body fat exists to carry us through times without food. But a person with plenty of stored energy will still wake up hungry tomorrow. There is no off switch, because in the world we evolved in, we never needed one. Food took great effort to get and never lasted.

Loneliness shows it too. We used to need each other in a literal sense: you lived or died with your tribe. Today most of us have our own homes, cars, and paychecks. We barely need each other to survive, but we still evolved to live together, so we feel the absence.

Notice what happened in both cases. Abundance of food created a new scarcity, of health. Abundance of independence created a new scarcity, of belonging. Misalignment is a form of scarcity, one that technology itself created.

The biologist E. O. Wilson put it well:

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

3. Three Places to Look

If the problem is a mismatch between environment and biology, there are only three places to look for a fix: the environment, our choices, and our biology.

The environment. We could bring back scarcity. Some people do, buying land and going off the grid. But they still depend on the grid for seeds, tools, plastics, and medicine. Those who truly cut themselves off take on the old dangers of scarcity: sickness, hunger, and injury. Turning back the clock trades one problem for an older and worse one.

Willpower. We could simply choose better: eat less, spend more time together. This works for some people some of the time. But willpower is not always on, and our environment and biology are. They push on us every hour of every day. That’s why most diets fail. And even when willpower wins, the prize is a life of constant self-denial. Shouldn’t life be enjoyable?

Biology. That leaves our bodies. GLP-1 drugs, the new weight-loss medications, show what this looks like. In effect, they give the body the off switch for hunger that evolution never installed. Many people who take them describe a new feeling: food freedom. They no longer have to fight their environment or their appetite, because their body is aligned with the world they live in.

Of the three, biology is the only lever that stays pulled. The environment keeps getting more abundant, and willpower keeps running out. That’s why I expect biology to be where the lasting solutions come from.

4. Where This Leads: Transhumanism

Follow the argument one more step. If technology creates abundance, abundance creates misalignment, and the lasting fix is to change our biology, then we will keep changing it. That path has a name: transhumanism, the use of technology to overcome our biological limits, including aging and disease, and eventually to go beyond the human form itself.

Here is where it starts to sound like science fiction. Consider space. Our bodies are poorly suited to exploring the cosmos. We may terraform a few planets, but it will often be easier to change ourselves than to change whole worlds.

Or consider belonging. Jonathan Haidt’s work shows that people are loyal mostly to their own group. Yet MDMA, whatever its problems, can make people feel connected to everyone. Imagine a safe treatment that strengthened our sense of belonging without clouding judgment. It might soften our political divides. To some readers this will sound dystopian, and I understand that fear: anything that changes how people feel about each other must be chosen by the person, never administered for political ends.

Our present selves find these ideas unnatural, and by definition they are. But I doubt our descendants will feel that way. Their bodies will feel as natural to them as ours feel to us.

Whether we call a technology progress or hubris depends on where we stand in time.

Conclusion: Aligned Abundance

So why does abundance feel so bad? Because we built a world our biology wasn’t made for. Technology turned scarcity into abundance, abundance put our environment out of step with our biology, and that mismatch is itself a new kind of scarcity. Changing the environment or relying on willpower won’t fix it for long. Changing our biology can.

What strikes me most about this story is that it doesn’t need a movement to make it happen. It runs on the same drive that produced fire, farming, and medicine: people refusing to accept scarcity. Scarcity has never worked for us, and unaligned abundance isn’t working either. Out of that tension, I expect transhumanism to become the next chapter of the human story.

I hold this conjecture with an open hand. There are other possible futures, some of them dark, and my work in AI means I wrestle with them often. I find this one the most likely because it follows the pattern we can already see across all of human history, rather than one invented in pure thought. But every model is a map, and maps can be wrong.

I hope you come away with wonder rather than fear. The future I see is one of aligned abundance for all.