---
type: claim
id: priority-inheritance-nascent-tech-inherits-value-from-future-capabilities
title: "Nascent technologies inherit strategic value from the future capabilities they are prerequisites for just as low-priority threads inherit priority from high-priority threads they block"
status: published
confidence: speculative
description: "Original concept from Abdalla 2021: stepping-stone technologies carry embedded optionality from futures they enable, analogous to CS priority inheritance"
domain: teleological-economics
importance: null
source: "Abdalla 2021 Architectural Investing; Hidalgo 2015 Why Information Grows product space analysis"
created: 2026-04-21
related:
  - products-are-crystals-of-imagination-embodying-knowledge-beyond-creators
  - personbyte-limit-constrains-product-complexity-to-network-size
  - economic-path-dependence-early-technological-choices-compound
  - doubly-unstable-value-prices-and-relevance-shift-independently
tags:
  - investment-theory
  - teleological-economics
  - optionality
  - stepping-stones
---

In computer science, priority inheritance solves the problem of priority inversion: when a low-priority thread holds a resource that a high-priority thread needs, the low-priority thread temporarily inherits the high thread's priority to ensure the critical work gets completed. Without this mechanism, the high-priority task is blocked indefinitely by something the system considers unimportant.

Applied to investment and economic development: technologies that are prerequisites for future capabilities of existential importance inherit strategic value from those future capabilities, even when their current market value reflects only their present utility.

Hidalgo's product space analysis shows this empirically. Economies diversify toward related varieties because some industries are necessary stepping stones — intellectual and industrial training grounds for more sophisticated capabilities. The jet engine industry cultivates the knowledge, knowhow, and specialist networks that eventually enable rocket engines. The jet engine's value as a stepping stone is distinct from and additional to its value as a propulsion system. It carries optionality from a future it helps create.

This creates an investable thesis: identify technologies that are on the critical path to capabilities humanity will eventually need — space habitation, sustainable energy, coordination infrastructure, disease prevention — and invest in them before the market recognizes their stepping-stone value. The market prices current utility accurately but systematically underprices prerequisite value because the future capabilities are speculative and the causal chain from stepping stone to endpoint is long and uncertain.

The risk is obvious: not every stepping stone reaches somewhere useful. Some precursor technologies lead to dead ends, and the time horizon for prerequisite value to be recognized can exceed any individual investor's patience. But the structural argument holds: if certain future capabilities are near-certain to be needed (they address existential risks or unlock fundamental human needs), then the technologies on the critical path to those capabilities carry embedded optionality that the market does not price.

This framework differs from standard optionality analysis in one key way: it is not about betting on which specific technology will succeed, but about identifying which KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWHOW must be accumulated regardless of the specific implementation. The stepping stone is the knowledge network, not the product.
