Boycott Dystopia

HACKER PABLOS HOLMAN KNOWS THE FUTURE NEEDS MORE ENERGY.

- NICK GILLESPIE

PABLOS HOLMAN IS a legendary hacker and cypherpunk whose career spans everything from helping Bill Gates fight malaria to working with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin.

Holder of more than 100 patents and founder of the venture fund Deep Future, Holman has built a life around what he calls “technology that matters.” His new book, Deep Future, is a call to “boycott dystopia” and to tackle civilization-scale challenges.

Holman backs inventors who think big: mushroom-based treatments that save collapsing bee colonies, revived Roman concrete formulas that could let buildings stand for thousands of years while cutting carbon emissions, space-based solar arrays that beam constant clean energy to Earth. For Holman, this is “deep tech” that can radically improve how people live, far beyond the incremental gains of another smartphone app.

In a September conversation with Reason’s Nick Gillespie, Holman talks about why the world needs a tenfold increase in energy production, how we mixed up policy on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, and why we should accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) development rather than slow it down. Holman’s optimism is infectious, and he invites people to imagine and build a world that refuses to settle for scarcity or stagnation.

Reason: The book is subtitled Creating Technology That Matters. What is technology that doesn’t matter?

Holman: We live in this world we think is full of technology, but it’s mostly just full of software. I think we're setting our sights a little low the last couple of decades. If you just have iPhone apps to have weed delivered to your dorm room by a drone, that doesn’t really feel like technology to me. Meanwhile, it’s taken our attention away from other technologies that could make a bigger difference.