# Creating technological second-order effects is a good thing I’ll offer a historical and a theoretical reason: the historical reason is simply that increasing human capability through our ability to manipulate the physical world has on net led to good things. That of course could run headlong into a black swan situation. The theoretical reason draws heavily on [[Maxwell Tabarrok]]’s [[tabarrokEnlightenmentValuesVulnerable2022]]: by building technology humanity is pulling balls out of a urn and pulling a black ball leads to extinction. However, some white balls can cancel out black balls. This is the standard [[Nick Bostrum]]-Ian formulation. However, I think Maxwell is right that the correct model is not that we draw out balls one at a time, but in great big handfuls. So to avoid an existential disaster, you actually want to increase your chances of drawing a counteracting white ball by pulling out as many balls at once as you can. A new material’s ability to drastically open the adjacent possible is roughly isomorphic to pulling out many balls.