Stasis is the enemy

Never before has the world been at such a true red pill vs blue pill moment.

• The red pill: the exponential growth of AI and related fields such as robotics, longevity, material science, and more is bringing us to a new stage of human flourishing. We bet on humanity solving any risks or uncertainty raised by these same technologies.
• The blue pill: we listen to our fears and slow down. We divide ourselves via feeble but seemingly important ideological civil wars. We scare ourselves with looming but never quite incoming nuclear threats. We hide behind our borders as geopolitical tensions rise in front of our ineptitude to address them.

In other words, one has to choose between embracing technological progress or refusing it altogether and embracing stasis.

Stasis is regression

Stasis and its perceived comfort is an illusion. A bridge not maintained doesn’t stay a bridge, it turns to rubble, leading to certain accidents, deaths, increased maintenance spending, and lost GDP. While we fight each other, deliberate, and regulate, entropy increases, compound interest works against us, and competing countries accelerate. The status quo is not stability, it is decay.

Let’s look at one of maybe the most controversial arguments for stasis, or as others put it, deceleration: the climate.

We have all been told climate is warming, partly because of the impact of our lifestyle and technologies, with the biggest culprit often pointed as the personal automobile due to its use of fossil fuels. While the electric car might help, the majority of electricity in the U.S. still comes from fossil fuel.

Yet, 98% fewer people are dying from climate related deaths compared to 100 years ago, down from 485,000 in 1920 to 9,000 in 2020. What changed? Did the climate get more lenient on us? Arguably not, as multiple scientists have gone on the record to alert the population of their concerns. No, here technological progress quite literally saved lives thanks to the invention of the same culprits: the personal automobile allows us to evacuate faster from concerning events, air conditioning allows us to live in warmer weather, satellite and weather tech advancements lead to earlier detection of life threatening events, and perhaps most importantly we applied technology to develop better more resilient buildings like in Japan where builders had to develop earthquake resistant buildings.

Of course, this is to be contrasted with CO2 emissions still rising, but here again we can engineer ourselves out of this concern through better means of energy production like solar, better CO2 capture systems, and desalination processes.

In this context, decelerating progress would mean refusing ourselves the means to solve the very same climate crisis we’d like to solve; and condemning thousands worldwide to dying from fully avoidable circumstances.

Progress is inevitable

While Europe, and to a lesser extent the U.S., debate whether we should invest as much as we do on AI, robotics, and related fields, China is accelerating to a never-before-seen scale. Maybe for the first time ever, we are seeing Chinese companies and products dominate over their American counterparts.

Consider the evidence: China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024—54% of global demand. For the first time, Chinese robotics manufacturers captured over half their domestic market, up from 28% a decade ago. Their AI startup DeepSeek built a model rivaling OpenAI’s best work for a fraction of the cost, forcing US companies to quietly adopt Chinese models, a trend which continues even today. Meanwhile, China’s Tiangong space station showcases modern engineering while the International Space Station ages toward retirement.

A couple decades ago, China was barely present in these domains. They didn’t innovate by having more resources—they had fewer, with US export controls blocking access to advanced chips. They innovated because constraints force efficiency. While American companies optimized for nearly infinite compute, Chinese ones were forced to learn to build better architectures.

The challenge with the debate on progress and whether we should slow down is that progress does not stop, and progress is far from equitable, for one must always keep up with it. Choosing to slow down progress is choosing to remain behind. Rival nation states and corporations will not stop developing AI, quantum, or better weaponry because a few people in the Western world are worried about consequences. In a world of rising geopolitical tensions and looming uncertainty, slowing down is simply not an option.

So here’s the real choice: embrace the exponential curve of progress and actively build solutions to the problems around us—or watch from the sidelines as 170,000 people die every day from solvable problems while competitors build the future.

Progress is not optional. The only choice is whether you participate.

Stasis is the enemy.