Visualizing technology, economics, and morality.
Technology is reshaping modern life. These articles connect that reshaping to its impact on our most important fabric — our institutions, our moral formation, and our children's futures. The responsibility to shape what comes next has never been greater.
Where technology has taken us, where it's going, and what our place in it may be.
To see where technology is taking us, look at what it has already done. Beyond material abundance, it has been shaping something quieter — the moral formation of the people who use it.
Society's future lives in the heart of its children. For thousands of years, that important responsibility was stewarded by local, incentive-aligned people. Today, for the first time in history, that shaping responsibility is shifting from people to technology itself. The divergence is already showing in the mental health of kids.
1900–2020. 7 Key Media Types
Technology is rapidly growing in capability — but is it fruitful? For many, there's a reality of two worlds: one of material abundance, but also one of inner longing. The fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control) may be the truest measure for assessing how positively technology is actually leading us.
Aggregate 'fruitfulness' score for 120 major technologies, 3000 BC–2000 AD
Technology drives abundance. The question is how that abundance gets distributed — and who ends up controlling the infrastructure now shaping attention, intelligence, and everyday life.
Technology has produced unquestionable abundance. But how has this been distributed? Today, a small number of firms leverage efficiency breakthroughs and technologies to deliver and capture wealth.
Percent of Total S&P 500 Market Cap Driven By Technology.
A human's most valuable asset may not be their time, but actually their attention. For thousands of years, humans had a great degree of control over their attention. Today, highly powerful and personalized machines compete for that attention — and frontier AI models now beat most humans on standard IQ tests.
1995–2024: Feed-Based vs. Non-Feed-Based Screen Time
Precise timelines are hard to predict, but the fundamentals give clues. These studies look at the structural properties of the current wave — what about this one is genuinely different from the ones before.
The steam engine and broadband internet looked quite different in form, but actually grew on quite similar curves. A logistic curve with a natural saturation point gave our institutions time to catch up and adapt. But today's advanced computational technology is different. It is growing exponentially, with no theoretical ceiling. This has never occurred before in a major technological wave.
Logistic v. Exponential Growth
For thousands of years, humans held the strongest thinking ability of any entity on Earth. Today, frontier AI systems can beat most humans on an IQ test, and that capability is rapidly growing. For the first time in recorded history, human intelligence has a serious challenger.
1900–2026. Machine's frontier intelligence over time.
Technology has always shaped our lives. What's different now is how deeply it can shape our morality. Given that power, it matters who is doing the building.
Do the people building the technology that shapes American life represent the religious and moral makeup of broader American society? The data says no — and the gap is wider than most people realize.
Top 17 Tech CEOs' Publically Stated Religious Affiliations Compared to General American Population.
Three critical disciplines shaped the core of Western life: humility, fasting, and prayer. In recent years we have largely lost them, and traded them for screen time. In an era of near-superhuman technological capability, it might be important to look again to these ancient practices — to stay grounded, gain wisdom, and understand how we can navigate these times.
1500–2025 AD. Humility from Google Books Ngram; Prayer + Fasting from survey and canonical records. All normalized 0–100.
The next 5–10 years of technology will cement the shape of much of what comes after. Each of us has a role — and the leverage available depends on where we sit.
Technology is shaping your child's values in ways no parent chose. A practical guide to what's happening and what to do.
Read →We need philosopher-builders — commercially serious operators whose moral framework doesn't give way to maximization.
Read →The highest-return positions in technology carry the largest moral externalities. The investor who sees both is the one this moment needs.
Read →Good values and careful arguments haven't slowed the systems. Start from what's actually happening — then ask what can move the incentives.
Read →The AI moment calls for the same institutional courage that built hospitals and schools and called nations to account — formation, clarity, presence.
Read →Understanding the problem is the first step. The next is coordinated action. The solution map collects specific interventions — sorted by lever type and stakeholder — so effort can be directed where it will move the most.
View the solution map →EconFaithAI exists because three things are happening at the same time and most analytical frames see only one of them. Technology is concentrating wealth, attention, and intelligence at structural extremes never seen before. Economic incentives that produced civilization-scale flourishing for 250 years are now producing measurable negative externalities at population scale. And the religious frameworks that historically grounded human meaning-making are eroding in a structurally specific way.
Each of the descriptive studies in this project documents one piece of the picture. The framework piece — The Exponential Shift — explains why this technological moment is structurally different from every prior one. The synthesis essay — Stewarding Technology's Amplifying Force — argues what the picture means and what to do about it.
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