The Existential Risk of Technology

In this critical time between worlds, technology is shaping the future of our lives, both as individual human beings and collectively as a species. Technology has brought great blessings in multiple vectors, and those benefits are regularly sung in the public sphere. However, the notion that technology is value-neutral is simply not true. All technology is encoded with value, pseudo-value—or tragically, with anti-value. So technology also threatens us with risks to our very existence on this planet.

There are two forms of existential risk: the potential death of humanity—an extinction event—and the potential death of our humanity. One primary cause for the death of our humanity is what we are referring to as the emergent “tech plex,” an immersive digital temple disassociated from the Field of Value. At the heart of the tech plex is the “planetary stack” that currently wires the entire planet—the increasing interconnection of algorithmic and technological infrastructure, social structure, and superstructure that encircles the globe. The result is upgraded algorithms and downgraded humanity, which is one main cause for the potential death of our humanity.

Interconnectivity without Intimacy.

In order to avoid this form of existential risk, we must respond with a new Story of Value. This story must be rooted in First Principles and First Values, which are not mere social conventions that humans have invented but rather the inherent value structure of the Intimate Cosmos. In this book, we begin to articulate a new Story of Value. This new Story is a scientifically grounded, creative, and joyful response to the alienated tech plex that relocates us deep in the Field of Value that lies at the heart of the universe. We reconnect the immersive environment of technology with Evolution: The Love Story of Universe, whose plotline is the progressive deepening of intimacies, animated at all levels by the pulse of Outrageous Love.