Is it really about immortality in the end?

Balaji Srinivasan is a busy technology enthusiast, he founded several internet companies, was a partner of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz and CTO of the crypto exchange Coinbase.

The other day Tim Ferriss invited him to his podcast again, and there Srinivasan chatted about how the world will develop.

Alexander Armbruster

Responsible editor for Wirtschaft Online.

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He thought about the so-called Web 3.0, which should make it possible to exchange not only information but real values, predicted that in the medium term an institutionally decentralized West would face a centralized China and India would position itself between the two poles, he spoke about Bitcoin mining as a battery equivalent to “store” the weather-dependent electricity generated by means of renewable energy sources in a commercially usable manner, when it should not be used otherwise, via the further development of the media, via state-controlled press and press-controlled states and much more.

Srinivasan is one of those who can work out future scenarios from many fragments of progress that go beyond the purely technical, that include what all of this may mean for politics, economy and society as a whole - and of course for each individual.

He dealt with it, and that was a little longer ago, also with the question of what purpose lies behind all technological progress.

This may be a strange undertaking from a philosophical point of view, because why should there be such a thing at all?

- His answer is nevertheless surprising and interesting, culminating in the sentence: "If the immediate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, then the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality."

He explains that breakthroughs are often described using words such as faster, smaller, cheaper or better.

In practical terms, this means that somehow more comes out of less - for example, that it takes less gasoline to drive 100 kilometers in a car, less effort to show a film to more people in different places, or to construct smaller transistors in order to getting more of it on an integrated circuit.

In this sense, technical progress reduces scarcity.

Calico, Sinclair, Raval

Mortality is now, the line of thought of the Stanford PhD scientist goes on, the central cause of scarcity, because: “If we had an infinite amount of time, we would worry less about whether something is faster.

The reason speed has value is because time has value;

the reason time has value is because human life has value and life span is finite.