Possible Futures

You cannot change what you don’t understand.

This phrase has become something of a private motto of mine. And it happens to sum up rather neatly why I’m starting this project.

At the risk of rehashing the cliche — look around you. Your phone alone is some 20 separate branches of tech, from lithium-ion batteries to the CPU and display. This is not even mentioning the software. This technology alone acts as a gateway to a colossal information web we have built in a mere 3-4 decades. The modern iteration, anyhow.

Has the impact been purely positive? Hardly. We’ll circle back to that.

Technology, sum total, is a colossal system. The arc of human progress is a long one indeed; you can break it down forever. From enduring trends such as Moore’s Law to individual companies shaping the modern world, down to specific individuals with outsized impact and influence.

Innovation and technology aren’t one of the same, but technological innovation specifically allows us to solve problems that simply could not be solved by any other means. Connecting people across continents, curing disease, supplying power for our needs that doesn’t torch the planet in the process. These and more are the products of technological innovation.

Simultaneously, technology itself is no miracle. We still have entire regions of the world that lack basic access to power, clean water, and so on. These are “solved problems“ on a technology level, but not on the societal one.

To create prosperity, we need both of those layers working in tandem.

To grossly oversimplify, this is an accelerant and distribution duet. Science and technology push the boundary of possibility forward. Social systems — geopolitics, culture, the economy, etc — govern how it’s used, who gets access, how it is accessed, and so on.

The entire point of innovation, after all, is to improve lives. As things stand, we are probably not far off from an age of true post-scarcity. In fact, perhaps only as little as a century away, if I were to hazard a guess.

But the road is anything but straightforward.

We would do well to figure out what that road looks like, and how we can speed it up — in a way that delivers global prosperity.

I started Meridian with two goals:

1. Explore how long-run technological innovation happens, and how it could be accelerated at the level of entire systems (Think state policy, global research cooperation, startup acceleration networks, talent development, etc).
2. Imagine what these technologies could enable, and what would be the optimal systems when new tech shifts around or removes certain constraints. In short, what are our possible futures?

This is the personal diary of my exploration. Most content here will fall into 4 categories:

- Deep Dives on tech: broad canvas on the future biotech, AI, robotics, etc > followed by more narrow exploration. I’m interested in the future of the entire field in 10-15 years — and what that can enable.

- Ecosystem Overview — looking at the state of innovation of countries & regions. EU startup landscape, biotech innovation coming out of China, spacetech in the US, so on. Along with, naturally, what the future direction looks like.

- Acceleration Models — exploring the most effective, impactful programs driving innovation. This spans everything from what makes programs like YC work to national innovation policy and highly successful special programs like DARPA. This is part of a separate project hosted under Meridian.

- Essays on what our world could look like in 20, 30 years. Long-run stuff. I’m aiming for these to be exploratory, extrapolating from current macro trends, with a bit of high-flying imagination sprinkled in.

If this sounds like a melange of different things, then in part you’re right. It is.

What I am fundamentally interested in is macro-level change: how it happens, where it’s going, and how it can be induced in a positive direction. Sometimes that means zeroing-in on a specific influential company, and sometimes it’s more worthwhile to look at entire regions. The topic is in essence the same.

The macro view is ultimately what I want to hone in on.

One final note, though I’ve hopefully already made that clear. Technology alone cannot deliver any utopia. Utopia as a concept is either way sociopolitical, in the sense that it depends on social design. A lot of what Meridian will be looking at will be unlocking certain limits by accelerating innovation to enable global prosperity — but positing technology alone as a solution is not my message. The world is alas a lot more complex than that.

What my message is, though, is that we can reach any future. It’s simply a matter of vision, coordination, equity, addressing emerging divides… yeah alright this is a very long list. But it can be done.

And we need to start imagining what tomorrow looks like. Along with how we get there — and where we want to get to.

Welcome to Meridian.