From Mere Security to Growth
So far, humanity has generally devoted itself to security, to survival. Food, shelter, and safety from violence have been the main concerns. Realizing a grand, elevating, self-actualizing, transcendent, long-term vision has been something very few people could do. That stuff is for kings and superhuman superheroes, right? The rest of us are just getting by. Isn’t that how it always has been and always will be? Maybe not. We are simultaneously better learning how to self-actualize and developing ever-better tools of human empowerment.
The Sailboat, the Safe Harbor, and the Sea
According to cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman, self-actualization and transcendence are better represented as a sailboat than as the famous pyramid associated with legendary psychologist Abraham Maslow. It’s a more dynamic picture illustrating the need to keep a solid core intact while exploring new frontiers.
Security is represented as the hull of the sailboat. If there is a hole in the boat, all that matters is getting the water out and patching the hole. Your world shrinks to the boat. What is on the horizon is irrelevant. If you have a secure life with enough food, physical safety, and human connection, though, your boat is sound, and you can look further out and aim beyond your current position.
With security well enough in hand, you will see some intriguing destinations beyond your current status. You will be able to unfurl your sails and shift from mere security to growth. This is where it gets interesting. This is where it gets more open-ended.
How can this metaphor be applied to the relatively rich part of the world? It might look like a bunch of sturdy boats sitting in the safe harbor of a rich land. The boats are seaworthy and watertight, but most captains are screaming that another captain is trying to sink them. They would like to go to a great, new place, but those jerks on the other side won’t let them. So everyone sits and hurls insults back and forth.
This looks dumb, you have to say. But there are good reasons for it. First, it’s easy to get into the habit of feuding and hard to get out of it. We are biologically and culturally evolved to unite against an enemy to protect our group. It’s very easy for scattered slights to turn into cause for a holy war.
Second, venturing out into the ocean is scary! It’s not that obvious that it’s a good idea when you’re already in a pretty good spot. Unless you know someone who has successfully ventured out beyond the horizon, it’s hard to imagine doing it yourself.
Setting Sail
If we could venture out with a good chance of success, and the upside was big enough, it would make sense for more of us to undertake adventures. Clearly, some people are on great adventures right now: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg spring to mind. They are instances of the revolutionary tech founder archetype, starting with only a good idea and going on an incredible run of good decisions and hard work. This looks like a meaningful, fulfilling kind of life: creating new things, benefiting billions of people, and changing the world.
The problem is, this is not common. There is a lot of unrealized human potential. And there are a lot of people who are pissed off that these few men are doing so much better than most. What could empower the rest of us?
The Enchanted Notebook
In what feels like years ago on the AI-accelerated timeline, September 2022, Packy McCormick imagined where AI could take us: “I wonder how far off we are from the Enchanted Notebook: the point at which technology eliminates, or dramatically shrinks, the gap between imagination and reverse engineering. And from there, how much further we are from the point at which technology eliminates, or dramatically shrinks, the gap between reverse engineering and execution.”
It already sounds a little less crazy than it did then. There has been major progress in AI tools since then with GPT-4 and new versions of MidJourney. If McCormick wrote the piece today, the AI-generated art would probably be much better, and the future he predicted would feel a little more real.
It’s an exhilarating, beautiful idea. It’s the promise of bringing the rare creative power of Musk or Zuckerberg within reach of every person on Earth.
The Magical Map
Another way to imagine the enchanted notebook is as a magical map. It would be a map you could draw and redraw, zoom into and out of, and even step into for a full, rich simulation of what you want to explore. It would be a tool suited to navigating the fractal complexity of this expansive world. This is what we are getting closer to. This is what we need to navigate the boat, choose destinations, and figure out how to reach them.
Software empowers the individual. Now with AI, it is empowering the individual at an accelerating rate. Tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney enable us to work with text and images in a variety of ways we can’t even really grasp yet. You can summarize any text, combine any disparate texts, and summon any writing you can imagine. You can type a few words to create a new, fantastical image, and even go from that image to a 3D world. We can not only navigate existing knowledge better, we can more easily build new ideas and plans with AI assistance. The more we can grasp these superpowers, the better we can grasp the world we live in and venture forth into epic journeys of growth.
Expanding Sails
As our abilities to navigate, manipulate, and generate text, images, and information in general increase, the rest of technology continues to progress. Mass manufacturing progress continues to make tools of all kinds cheaper and more abundant. Computers, phones, cars, and everything that is manufactured on a large scale steadily improves and gets cheaper. This more recognizable kind of technological progress can be thought of as improving the sail, increasing the speed and distance the boat can go.
The Endless Adventure
So it looks like we are quickly coming to have what we need to undertake a journey of growth and exploration. It won’t be easy. It can’t be easy if it’s important. All we can ask is for it to be possible for the average person to self-actualize and have the power to express their creativity. And it looks like we are getting that power, bit by bit. That will be a better world. It will be a world where people worry less about others doing better than them because they are focused on their own projects. It will be a more secure, growth-oriented world where the typical life is an endless adventure.