This is an elitist statement. That there’s no reason to be this fast, and therefore we have to slow down! It’s truly remarkable the level of intelligence I have available on my phone with a $200/month pro plan. However, it’s way too expensive for this to be widely available to billions of people around the world. Tao is worried about the nonlinear nature of progress, except that technological breakthroughs, almost by definition are nonlinear. Otherwise, we would have run out of resources in the world long time ago. People forget how recently we figured out how to produce food at today’s scale. In the 1800s, an important source of fertilizer was an island off the coast of South America. Birds had spent centuries dropping their shit there, building up deposits that people mined for fertilizer. Then came a remarkable invention by the German scientist Haber, which Bosch helped scale industrially. By combining nitrogen from the air with hydrogen, using energy, we could manufacture ammonia for fertilizer. Fertilizer from thin air. There’s another lesson in there about the nature of technology. The same technology that helped create an abundance of food also enabled the production of explosives at scale.