The intuitive wonderment of "why can't we optimize life" can be demonstrated by comparing own life to an iPhone.
Look at the unbelievable optimization seen in your recent smartphone. It is optimization upon optimization. All laid to utter perception almost.
Your life? maybe you know whether 1 vs 2 spoons of sugar is best (fun fact. nobody does 1.3 spoons, even though this will be taste optimal for some certainly!)
The answers to this wonder are a good start for considering the difficulties of life optimization.
1) its machinery. Humans a complicated, unstable, and hard to pin down. There is no "0.46% of boron-oxide" type consistency and simplicity.
2) Economics of scale.
You can invest $10 billion in the machinery of producing CPUs. But this one system will produce millions of units.
In humans, each one might need its own system. No economics of scale.
3) The agency problem.
In order for someone to create an optimization for you, he needs to earn money from it.
In phones its simple. Apple creates them, and gets paid if they are good enough.
Is anyone going to get paid $10,000 to make you healthier?
Of course, one can make pennies by selling a book, or ads on her diet site.
But the money earned is minuscule in relation to to value created.
This means that nobody is going to invest $2,000 to reliably make you healthier.
Even if the value of making you healthier is $100,000, nobody is going to get paid serious money to make it happen.
Apple makes billions to make phones.
Get you to be healthy?
maybe one can get some google ads cents.
Look at the unbelievable optimization seen in your recent smartphone. It is optimization upon optimization. All laid to utter perception almost.
Your life? maybe you know whether 1 vs 2 spoons of sugar is best (fun fact. nobody does 1.3 spoons, even though this will be taste optimal for some certainly!)
The answers to this wonder are a good start for considering the difficulties of life optimization.
1) its machinery. Humans a complicated, unstable, and hard to pin down. There is no "0.46% of boron-oxide" type consistency and simplicity.
2) Economics of scale.
You can invest $10 billion in the machinery of producing CPUs. But this one system will produce millions of units.
In humans, each one might need its own system. No economics of scale.
3) The agency problem.
In order for someone to create an optimization for you, he needs to earn money from it.
In phones its simple. Apple creates them, and gets paid if they are good enough.
Is anyone going to get paid $10,000 to make you healthier?
Of course, one can make pennies by selling a book, or ads on her diet site.
But the money earned is minuscule in relation to to value created.
This means that nobody is going to invest $2,000 to reliably make you healthier.
Even if the value of making you healthier is $100,000, nobody is going to get paid serious money to make it happen.
Apple makes billions to make phones.
Get you to be healthy?
maybe one can get some google ads cents.
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