Stability Tech: The beginning…

I have a confession to make. An existential anxiety has been gnawing at me more and more the last few years. It stems from my optimistic belief that we humans have now created such abundance here on earth (albeit VERY poorly distributed), but that abundance seems in great peril of being accidentally destroyed by us. Destroyed by our pointless wars and un-needingly powerful weapons, or destroyed by out of control climate change, or greatly slowed by some breakdown in our systems that we can’t even foresee at the moment.

The great Kurzgesagt Team sums up a few of the ways we can deftly destroy our prosperous future

We, as humans, stand on the brink of the most prosperous time in our existence, and our lack of stability and thus susceptibility to losing it all scares the shit out of me. To use a sports analogy (apologies!), this is when the coach would turn to her team and say, “this game is ours to lose”.

So with so much on the line, why is there not a very specific tech field of focus on keeping us from “losing the game”?? As you can tell from the post title, I think there should be and I’m proposing we name it Stability Tech (or as has been suggested by a good friend and staunch opponent of words with more than 2 syllables, Stable Tech — please vote in the comments).

It’s worth noting here in the intro that technology is just a great enabler and can never be the full solution to any of our major human goals. This post and subsequent ones on the topic are not meant to give answers to these major problems, but more humbly focused on defining this new specific type of tech and how best to support the teams that will build it.

What is Stability Tech?

Stability Tech is technology that brings greater stability to systems and the earth in general.

I think it’s worth mentioning, that although my personal fear is based in larger existential size losses of stability, even much smaller increases in stability of many systems can have a significant positive effect on reducing human suffering around the world.

I suggest using the following criteria test to decide if a technology fits into Stability Tech (please add suggestions for tweaks to these criteria or wording in the comments!):

1. The main purpose of the technology is to increase stability in a system.

2. The technology is capable on its own (without needing additional technologies to guide it) to decide the proper settings of the parameters of a system to keep it more stable.

The biggest factor in growth and happiness/health of any system is stability. Even if the system is in some non-optimal configuration, it is much better than being unstable. Sure, we eventually try to optimize all systems for additional goals, but if you think about it, we only really talk about a system failing when it loses stability.

Changes up and down in stock markets are fine, but if it drops to far too quickly it causes chaos and is said to have failed.

Case in point, a stock market can be flat and not too lucrative for most participants, but it only really “fails” when it drops too quickly/unexpectedly — aka “crashes”.

We humans are highly adaptive and our ability to literally take over the world the last hundred thousand years is due, in large part, to that amazing adaptability. However, our adaptive power can only protect us if the change is kept within a certain rate of change. When systems become unstable, we are effectively saying that they are changing too rapidly for most of us to effectively adapt.

This is all to say that by far the most fundamental need we have is to keep stability in all our vital systems. It is not just one of the factors, it is THE factor. So this compels me to put out this call to start focusing more intentionally on exactly that.

So what would be some examples of Stability Tech?

As my personal greatest fear is out of control war (ie nuclear war), one main example that comes to mind would be technology that brings all of us humans closer together and makes diplomatic failures or irrational decision making/sociopathy that lead to war less and less probable.

I believe that the vast majority of humans (say 90% at least) are highly motivated to get along with their neighbors and everyone else on earth. So it would seem that there is a real possibility to leverage this intention better with specific technology to bring greater stability to the world.

Along similar lines, I think some decentralized governance technologies (DOAs, blockchains, etc.) could well pass the criteria for inclusion in Stability Tech. If we believe in the good intentions of most humans, then disallowing disproportionate decisioning making power from a small number of the overall participants in a system would be very squarely in the Stability Tech realm.

Another great example could be some of the tech companies focusing on climate change. I see a future coming where we have mastered how to reduce greenhouse gases. We will then quickly move to what will most likely prove to be a much greater challenge, which is to actually keep a stable equilibrium in the atmosphere. This will be all about climate stability and how best to balance such a complex system.

I think this is also a great place to apply our two criteria and see if a particular climate focused company would fall within Stability Tech. Let’s look at a company that has a technology that removes carbon from the atmosphere.

1. The main purpose of the technology is to increase stability in a system. — No, the company’s main purpose is to remove carbon from the atmosphere (and indirectly reduce the average atmospheric temperature).

2. The technology is capable on its own (without needing additional technologies to guide it) to decide the proper settings of the parameters of a system to keep it more stable. — No, although the company could likely be a great component of a system that regulates climate, it would not be capable on its own to decide the proper settings of all the climate parameters to increase stability.

So we see that this awesome Climate Tech company that removes carbon from the atmosphere would not actually be part of Stability Tech. The important thing to remember is that all these solutions are interconnected. A technology that focuses on climate stability will most likely need to be able to call on other technology that can specifically reduce carbon levels.

Now what kind of tech would be considered stability tech then? A seemingly similar, but actually fundamentally different, company that had technology to regulate the correct amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as in not too much and not too little) or maybe more broadly control systems that would regulate the rise and fall of average atmospheric temperature WOULD be considered Stability Tech.

For the next example, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the most personal and catastrophic loss of stability that has killed every single human being ever. That would be the loss of stability (homeostasis) of our bodily systems, which we call disease and death. Our bodies don’t need to work optimally to enjoy our lives. However, we need them to keep a certain level of stability or we lose our ability to enjoy life and then die — cease to exist. More and more efforts should be focused on keeping that stability and thus allowing us to live full and enjoyable lives for much longer.

Full disclosure, this is where I spend most of my time as the Co-Founder, along with Pete Ward, of Humanity — effectively a navigation app to keep your bodily systems stable for longer — we describe it as slowing down your Rate of Aging. If you have an iPhone (as of writing we’re not quite on Android — coming soon!), download it and try it out for yourself.

Humanity - Stay healthy longer

And the last popular example I can give is AI (artificial intelligence). It is well known and widely spoken about that creating artificial intelligence that can learn and think on its own can bring a great amount of additional prosperity to the world BUT inherently creates a massive possibility of de-stabilizing almost every system on earth.

Everyone around my age learned this lesson with the very stark portrayal in Terminator 2 of well meaning, although possibly overly naive, scientists creating technology that de-stabilizes the earth and ends up making the world a hellscape in the future.

Terminator 2 is a fantastic cautionary tale for creating great technology but not spending enough time on building stability protections into the system

Terminator 2 taught many people my age that seemingly innocuous technology today can lead to catastrophic loss of stability and thus destruction of life as we know it

OK, MG, I agree, so what can I do?

I am just starting out on my journey of researching the existing technologies in Stability Tech (there are undoubtedly already great ones to find and learn about/from).

My asks:

1. to help point me towards technologies you think will do or are already doing great things in this space already — possibly still in the research and basic science stages — think keywords like feedback loops, complex systems, homeostasis, resilience, etc.
2. to connect me with great investors (angels, VCs, family offices, corporates) that are already focusing some of their energy and funds on this Stability Tech (and just not calling it that yet)
3. let’s coin the term Stability Tech together and get people talking about it. Once we humans focus our intentions on something, there is no limit to what we can accomplish!

My offers:

1. happy to mentor any company or researcher that is building something in Stability Tech
2. possibly in the near future starting a small fund to directly invest into these projects
3. feel free to reach out at mdgeer at gmail

A big thank you for those that helped me with drafts of this post and continue to point me towards more rabbit holes to explore here in the coming weeks and months! To name just a few: Marina Geer, Peter Ward, Avi Roy, Tina Woods, David Gorodyansky, Karen Lorre, Kyle Samani, Askar Ramazanov, Mike Butcher, Dr Jack Kreindler, Jon Gillespie-Brown, Saasha Celestial-One, Pingtjin Thum