# When a technology changes everything, does life get better? (part 2)

Posted 2026-10-31 · Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yWmo9C3HPk

> When a technology really changes everything, does life get better for most people?

**The prior it challenges:** If a technology is a real advance, life gets better for most people right away

## Transcript

Rethink your priors.

Last time I said the next one was going to have a lot of farming, and I meant it.

So when a technology really changes everything, does life get better for most people?

I was talking about this with a family member, and he said this isn't the first time in human history an advance has fundamentally changed the organization of society. It's like the agricultural revolution.

People started cultivating wild cereals like wheat and barley around eleven and a half thousand years ago, and farming is what made cities possible. Basically, the first writing we know of shows up in Sumer around 3200 B.C., and it was used for recording transactions, so kind of the first receipts.

And here's the part I didn't expect. When researchers look at skeletons from that switch, health got worse. One review found declining health in 19 of 21 societies that made the move to farming, with more infectious disease, more bad teeth, and people getting shorter.

And it wasn't a short dip. In a lot of places that drop in height lasted thousands of years before it came back up. So the advance was real, and the people who lived through it mostly paid for it.

So does life get better? Eventually, for a lot of people, but not on its own, and not for the people living through the switch unless somebody plans for them. I build AI agents for a living, and the way I build them is I start from the outcome a person needs and then decide what the agent takes off their plate, instead of starting from what the tech can do and figuring out the people later.

Next time, the math. Mathematicians are already fighting about who gets credit for proofs AI helped with.

Anyway. Start from the outcome. Or don't. I'm not your manager. Follow for more.

---
Rethink your priors by Eduardo Martínez. AI implementation. Outcomes over tools. And everything else.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rethinkyourpriors · Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rethinkyourpriors/ · Work with Eduardo: https://edumartinez.ai/