Let's take a clear pond flourishing with various aquatic plants — water lilies, duckweeds, water milfoils, you name it. The variety of these plants provide a delicate balance, feeding the pond with nutrients, and this very natural filtration system creates a stable equilibrium in the pond. Just the right amount of sunlight, algae, aquatic plants in the right balance. The algae still tries to outcompete the aquatic plants, but these plants still have an edge (at least for now). The microbial balance ensures the pond stays in a stable state with manageable algae levels. It's in stable equilibrium.

But unfortunately, the pond starts having even more higher levels of nutrients feeding in. The runoff is too high, or a group of fishermen have one day decided to start dumping all the fish waste into the same pond. Now the stability gets disrupted. And it slowly accumulates and grows towards a tipping point. It might just need a small push towards either clear water, or towards an algae-dominated state. In systems theory, you call this tipping point as an unstable equilibrium.

If you think this is a story about the ponds, and the tiny little fish, and the plants, you're mistaken.

This is a story of the same patterns which we see in ponds, the dance between stable and unstable modes of equilibrium reflected across our economy, especially in the dance between technology and regulation.

You can roughly categorize various countries in their mode of mechanism — Are they pushing for more regulatory capture? Or are they immersed in risky bleeding-edge technologies and are constantly wanting to push innovation?

When Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Radium in 1903, she also suffered from the consequences of discovering the potent radioactive substance. Even though the new field of radiology was discovered, she suffered from aplastic anemia and died due to harmful exposure.

We see this continue to happen, even now with the advent of biohacking, where we see humans taking early risks (who sometimes also see the rewards).

Balaji talks about the people bio-engineered with mutations associated with muscular hypertrophy, resembling real-life X-men scenarios, who are endowed (not gifted) with exceptional health related traits. We might see more of these instances happening in the future — perhaps, someone is now endowed with an artificial immunity to COVID, or any of the future variants of COVID? perhaps, they might build a weird version of alcohol tolerance. Very soon, we might even see artificial ears and eyes. And X-men might soon be real.

And this huge leap in innovation doesn't come in silos, it's very much coupled with the risk element. One way to think about this is if we look at Lance Armstrong the cyclist, who did violate the rules of Tour de France through the doping incident, but his chemists should actually be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry as they helped bring a man back to the game, who was previously suffering from testicular cancer, to now winning a Tour de France. There would be a lot of testicular cancer patients who would want some of that. Despite some of the risks involved in the early stages due to the testing. And as enough people early on take that risk, it makes it even more safer for the larger population to then try this new bio-innovation.

One of the other examples of an early adopter risk that helps leapfrog tech hurdles are the challenge tests conducted during COVID. When the pandemic began, Harvard Professor Matthew Liao proposed wanting to shorten the time from pandemic to functional vaccine by getting healthy volunteers to deliberately expose themselves to SARS-CoV-2 under controlled conditions.

These trials offered distinct advantages over traditional field studies which might have taken 10-15 years to develop. When you gain something, you might also lose something (in this example, approximately 1% of early testers reported long-term symptoms). Balaji mentions this through an example from the movie, 'Limitless', and its central plot of a drug that boosts cognitive abilities without side effects.

And for any such 'frightening technology' being discussed and implemented, we have the 'big daddy regulators' trying to give a pushback to its accelerationism. If the challenge trials represented the tech innovation led approach towards solving the global pandemic. The regulatory approach would be stringent lockdowns implemented by various countries (especially China and UK).

In fact, regulations are one of the major bottlenecks for progress. At present, all the major FAANG companies are building massive GPU cluster farms that are being created needing vast computing resources.

In 2024, we were used to having these clusters of 100 MW, two more years, we might have a 1 GW Cluster. If we soon see trillions of dollars invested into these GPU clusters, we might very well see a 100 GW cluster. To accommodate these ambitious targets, we're seeing a huge push from the libertarian technocrats to now build nuclear capacity to manage the hungry AI farms. And most of these nuclear proposals face an immense regulatory pressure. Take for instance the construction of Hinkley Point C in UK which took almost 10 years. By contrast, France and Finland built similar reactors in just three or four years (Hinkley Point C had to go through a 44,260 page environmental impact assessment (EIA) and 2,229 written questions at examination stage of Sizewell C, the next reactor after Hinkley Point C, facing enormous expenses before the spade was even in the ground, it is still not). In fact, Sizewell C's EIA was more than 30 times longer than the complete works of Shakespeare.

More recently, Elon Musk highlighted an example from the German bureaucracy during the establishment of Tesla's first European plant. He revealed that the permit application process required up to 25,000 pages of documentation, which not only had to be printed on paper but also needed multiple copies made. The sheer volume of paperwork was so extensive that it literally required a truck to transport all the documents. And this is 2025.

We're a quarter of century into the 21st century, and we're still dealing with regulatory bureaucratic paper work.

We see dangers of regulatory capture all around with FDA and European Medicines Agency (EMA), but there are various merits of a healthy dose of regulation. Despite the backlash against European regulation, we see its merits when it comes to food regulation, where Europeans have better life expectancy and have lesser preventable deaths compared to Americans. This is majorly because of Europe's EFSA where food regulatory policies focusing on additives to be proven safe before approval, whereas US FDA allowing food additives unless proven harmful.

The dance between regulation and innovation mirrors our pond's delicate equilibrium: push too far towards unrestrained technological acceleration and we risk drowning in toxic algal blooms of unforeseen consequences, yet too much regulatory stagnation leaves us with a lifeless pond unable to sustain new growth.

There are no good answers towards how we solve this. We can only wait, and watch this dance unfold.