Bryan Johnson argues that technology improves iteratively while humans repeat destructive habits we've normalized: overeating, smoking, drinking. His Blueprint project uses emerging tech to reverse aging and improve health, betting that personal transformation works better than trying to fix society from outside.
I enjoy building with things where when a given iteration is built, it becomes stable and reliable and then that thing can be improved to the next version and the next to the next. You rarely revert V4 back down to a V1 in terms of its functionality. Bugs may appear fine, but you generally can scaffold the gains. And that's not really true with humans. We have this tendency to engage in just self destructive behaviors. We eat too much food, we eat too much of the wrong food. We may smoke, drink excessively, we may have all kinds of bad habits. Is it the case that we've so normalized these self destructive behaviors that we're disoblivious to it? In fact, we celebrate it and so we just have this culture and norm of these self destructive behaviors? The entirety of Blueprint was this idea I've been thinking about for a decade, which is we're in this special moment on planet Earth with the emergence of this technology. Where do we go as a species? There's two ways of going about doing it. One would be to point out all the things that need to change in the world or be improved or whatever. The other is to point in itself. And I thought that might be the more promising starting point is looking within myself.
