The Life Factory

May, 2023

Any kind of innovation or technology that we keep around and use for a sufficiently long period will fundamentally increase net human life. Net human life can be calculated at any point by multiplying world population with the average expected lifespan.For thousands of years, net human life has been steadily increasing.

Though it is obvious to point out, net human life increases when either the world population or the average life expectancy increases. But there is a third less obvious variable at play. That variable is the child mortality rate. Child mortality rate has been steadily decreasing, which means more people actually get to have a life to live.

This means there are three main approaches that technology uses to increase net human life.

  1. It increases our capacity to have more people on earth (increases world population)

  2. It increases our average lifespan

  3. It improves our chances of living past the age of five (decreasing the child mortality rate)

When we create something new, there is no guarantee it will do any of those three. In fact there is a chance it will harm us. What I believe is guaranteed is that if we continue to use something or keep something for a sufficiently long period, whether we realize it or not, it will increase net human life.

I will start with an obvious example of technology being used to increase net human life, then move to some less obvious, more interesting examples.

Some technology is made with the specific goal of increasing one of the three specified variables above. For example, the invention of the vaccine, which is a direct attempt to increase life expectancy by making us more immune to diseases.

We also took this immunization a step further when we eradicated smallpox. Smallpox was declared eradicated on May 8th, 1920, about 200 years after we began working on a vaccine. The full eradication was enabled by technologies like heat-stable freeze-dried vaccines and bifurcated needles. Without them many places would still be fighting smallpox. [1]

The entire medical field is working directly on increasing net human life. What’s slightly less intuitive is that even technology that wasn’t built with that goal in mind will stick around if it archives it anyway. For example:

As tribes, we were in constant war with each other. We were actively killing each other on a daily basis. In order to win over neighboring tribes, we made weapons and tools to make our killing more efficient.

Interestingly enough, our sharpened flint on a stick proved to be useful for more than just killing humans. It was also quite useful when it came to killing other animals for food. Hunting becomes easier, we can get more food more efficiently, so we can sustain more people in a tribe.

Although we were absolutely massacring our neighboring tribes, the innovation that came as a result still increased net human life by increasing the amount of humans we could handle.

Birth control, which is literally meant to prevent human births, might be assumed to lower net human life, but it doesn't. Though I wasn’t able to find a dataset of global child mortality rate dating back a few hundred years (so I could analyze the effects of different types of birth control) it makes intuitive sense to me that giving more control over when and where a baby is had means it has less chances of dying before reaching the age of 5. Therefore, birth control lowers child mortality rate, and as such increases net human life.

One more example, here is a graph of the number of wars started in the 78 years before and after nuclear bombs were used.

The number of wars substantially decreased in the 78 years afterwards compared to before. The possible threat of nuclear war is simply too high for us to fight in the same way we did before. [2]

So the invention and possessions of these weapons is absolutely horrific and causes a threat to the entirety of humanity, but the number of wars we would have fought if we didn’t have them is much higher.

As a result, holding nukes prevents future losses.

I hope these examples properly illustrate that any technology we create, if it sticks around long enough, is bound to increase the amount of human life on earth (intentionally or not).

Why this happens? I’m not quite sure. I imagine as humans, our biological drive to reproduce extends past ourselves. We have a biological drive to increase human life. Which means that as a society, the things we create will only stick around if they do in fact increase life.

The implications for the future are that as we create more things, life on earth will increase. And as the pace of innovation continues to speed up, that will also increase human life. This does not mean we should not be careful with what we create.

Technology only proves to increase life if we retain it for a long enough duration; technology that we don’t keep around simply doesn't achieve this. We may in fact create things and discard them shortly after because it did not increase life. This is how catastrophic events will happen. We will create things that lower the amount of life on earth, but it will take us too long to discard.

Not all technology increases life, but technology that sticks around does.

[1]. Strassburg, M. A. (1982). The global eradication of smallpox. American Journal of Infection Control, 10(2), 53–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/0196-6553(82)90003-7

[2]. Data on the wars was taken from the wikipedia pages inside this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_wars_by_date