A Concise History of Human Ambition

Technologies of ambition

The past couple of decades have conclusively validated the disruptive potential of technology in society. Little analysis though has been directed at one of the wildest driving forces of society, and its tech-driven metamorphosis: human ambition.

What the top 1% most ambitious people in each society choose to do with their one and precious life has a dramatic impact on the entire society.

Regardless of your political views on how society should be organized, the history of technological progress is one of asymmetric outcomes. Governments understood through history that to leap forward they must endure a large number of coin tosses. It is not about how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how it shakes the earth when it happens. How frequent the profit is irrelevant. The magnitude of the outcome is where the money is at.

Hence, the game you decided to play in every given era matters a huge deal. The idea of a ‘technology of ambition’ is the main social construct here. That is the ‘technology’ that gives an individual maximum odds to deliver impact in a given geography and era. Think about it in terms of attempting to win big at a casino, and deciding whether to sit at the blackjack table or to try your luck at craps. Maximizing impact is the essence of ambition, so ambitious individuals seek out paths that give access to their era’s dominant ‘technology of ambition’.

Of monks and bros

If you were born in early medieval Europe and were not the child of a great landowner, your prospects would have been rather bleak. There were few ways to have an impact beyond the village in which you were born. Literacy was the great ‘technology of ambition’ of the pre-modern period. If you could write down instructions and there were people who could read them, you could administrate at scale. Not Facebook-like scale, but surely farther than the village you were born in.

If you wanted to read and write, you had to join the Church. Virtually all modern 22-year-old finance bros would be training to be monks and priests, had they been born a thousand years ago. Not from piety, but from bare, raw ambition.

Fast forward a few hundred years and the dominant ‘technology of ambition’ has shifted. By the late 18th century, armies were professionalizing and the modern state was emerging. Military command is the new ‘technology of ambition’ that the most ambitious people want to master. By 1800-ish, the military command had the leverage to move battalions in Russia by just pronouncing a single word in Paris. It’s this ‘technology’ that allows the young Napoleon Bonaparte to progress from Corsican obscurity to French emperor.

Skip another couple of generations and finance emerges as the dominant ‘technology of ambition’. Cheques and memos written in New York reverberate around the world. Figures like J.P. Morgan are associated with transformational accomplishments for society, like the organization of America’s railroad system in the late 19th century. Finance’s dominance as the default career path for ambitious people has been remarkably enduring.

From writing cheques to writing code

There’s at least one corner of the world where this default path hasn’t been the norm for the past couple of decades. San Francisco is surely one. The most ambitious individuals in Silicon Valley want to build technology companies. It is now sufficiently clear that this paradigm will become the dominant technology ambition over the next century.

Entrepreneurship built on both Internet-based and more advanced technologies (e.g., biotechnology, robotics, quantum computing…) probably represents the most powerful ‘technology of ambition’ that ever existed. There are three reasons for this. Ever-growing scale, ever-growing scope, and ever-falling cost.

• Scale: because of the Internet, technologies allow you to deliver an impact on a way a larger group of people than at any time in history. Did anyone in human history have an impact on a couple of billion people a day before the 21st century? The number of people in the world with an internet connection is constantly increasing.

• Scope: technologies are general-purpose vehicles. Whatever the focus of an individual’s ambition, modern technologies provide a means for achieving it. Software is eating the world. Today, the largest 10 companies in the world by market cap are technology companies. Even people with no intrinsic interest in technology itself can and will turn to modern manifestations of technology to realize their ambitions.

• Cost: The cost of starting (if not scaling) a technology company has collapsed over the last decade. Being able to reuse open source code and rent, not buy, computational power has made technology entrepreneurship much more accessible as a ‘technology of ambition’.

The last one is the most profound shift of all. Moving from the J.P. Morgan model of ambition to the Mark Zuckerberg model shifts the balance of power from capital to talent. Ambitious people have gone from writing cheques to writing code. And because access to coding skills is cheap, today the most ambitious individuals don’t own the means of production - they are their own means of production. This gives ambitious people unprecedented power. Now go tell that to Marx.