Where We Are: Between Dread and Hope
As we have empowered ourselves ever more with our tools, broadly conceived as everything from hammers to AI to constitutional democratic republics, we have at the same time sought escape from the burden of great power and responsibility in an ever-more-complex world. We are deeply conflicted.
It seems to be in our nature as humans to restlessly imagine better futures and work to realize them, but this endless process of empowerment and complexification seems to be stressful and at times overwhelming. So we have the complementary impulse to escape. An abundance of cliches spring to mind: to get away from it all, to leave all the hustle and bustle behind, or to move to an idyllic commune.
It's easy to just pick a side and settle into one simple, comfortable way of looking at this issue, this deep conflict. I'm guilty of it. I'm one of the eternal optimists who always focuses on the bright side of technological and scientific progress. I have looked forward to the next new thing since I was 5. I remember dreaming of the next Mario or Half-Life game or the next Porsche 911. At the same time, there is always much fear of the new, and it’s often justified, but it can become limiting and paralyzing.
The obvious, boring, clichéd answer is that both are right and both are wrong, that each perspective picks up on some salient aspects of the issue and misses others, and that the two perspectives should be synthesized into a more sophisticated view. That, of course, is hard, much harder to formulate and maintain than either simplistic view. So we careen between dreams and nightmares. The nightmares tend to have the advantage as they are better able to strike deep into us. We are, after all, vulnerable creatures who are driven largely by fear.
So there is a deep and pervasive feeling of chaos and careening towards annihilation, of our creations evolving to become sentient and superintelligent and replacing the now-obsolete humanity. This kind of image is ubiquitous in our culture going back centuries, from Frankenstein's monster to The Terminator.
The dreams of humans transcending their limitations and creating paradise on Earth with science, technology, and moral progress are sparser and more fleeting. They are niche, while prophecies of doom are mainstream. Techno-utopia doesn't sell like techno-dystopia. It doesn't compel. It has just a handful of nerdy fans (though some of those fans end up creating world-changing technologies).
So we awkwardly bumble along, moving forward, then getting scared and pulling back. We create clean Energy too cheap to meter, then swear it off because it is unnatural and scary.
Where We Might Go: Universal Empowerment
How can we do better? There are two essential problems with the modern world, the world where Progress is a bedrock assumption. First, change is scary, and the faster, the scarier. Second, we can't help but notice that changes tend to benefit people in an uneven way, first the few who usher them in and amass great power, before gradually trickling down to the rest of us.
These are deep, natural, human responses to a world that we are not biologically evolved to handle. They recognize and respond to important realities. Stepping back and looking at the big picture, though, it seems like we could do better.
There is probably a way to regain the deep feeling of alignment and harmony we might have had back in the hunter-gatherer days, the feeling that we are masters of our world, we are part of a cohesive community, and we are heading to a better future together. We don't have to live with this deep unease, this nihilistic feeling of absurdity and weakness. We don't have to be at war with each other for scarce resources. We can all rise together, stepping up into a better place where we are all something more than we are today, individually and collectively.
Sounds ridiculous, sure. But let's assume for a minute that such a thing is possible. What might that look like? What would enable that to happen? What if forthrightly taking on and mastering modernity has just always been a bit out of reach for most people, and all we need are better tools?
Clearly, it is possible to thrive in the modern world. The obvious examples are the top tech entrepreneurs: Musk, Brin, Page, Zuckerberg, and others. The world-conquering tech founder archetype is the most obvious example of a way of living in the 21st century that works. They are self-actualizing. They are probably experiencing flow every day as they play right at the limits of their abilities, mastering the frontiers of technology and even space. They are not despairing. They are not primarily focused on tearing down, but on building up. In a cynical, nihilistic time, they are marked by their optimism, deep sense of purpose, and lack of destructive impulse.
Well, that's nice for them, many would say. So maybe a few dozen or hundred people are really thriving in the 21st century while everyone else is dragged along or crushed underfoot. That's unfair. It's obscene. It's outrageous. It's wrong.
It depends on how you look at it. It depends on how you see things playing out, and how you extrapolate the trends. What if, instead of focusing on how these few exceptional individuals are diverging from us or leaving us behind, we focus on how they are showing us the way, and we can thrive as they do? What if, instead of thinking no one should be that powerful, we decide that everyone should be that powerful?
It might be that we just needed better tools to get past this phase when so many people feel unable to self-actualize while others rocket off to Mars. It seems unfair that Elon Musk gets to have thousands of people working for him, while the average person has none. But with ubiquitous AI, we can all be the leaders of a team of artificially intelligent assistants. That's radical empowerment that most of us can't even conceive of yet, but it will become clear over time. We will come to grips with our newly multiplied power. We will soar.
Every person has their ideal way of living out there somewhere, but we don't always make it to that plane of self-actualization. There are many ways to get lost or to get crushed by the world. The more empowering and widespread the tools at our disposal, the better a world it will be. More people will have the power to self-actualize and experience flow and peak experiences. The future will be less frightening because more people will feel that they are part of creating it. It will feel fairer because everyone will be getting empowered greatly at once.
That would be a better world. That's why we have to have faith that we can both create better tools and figure out how to make them work for us. Because technology is the only thing that allows everyone to rise, instead of being stuck in zero-sum contests in a world of scarcity. To conclude, here is a vision from Naval Ravikant, one of the people who is living an abundant, creative life at the frontier of technology:
...the reality is everyone can be rich. We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago.
200 years ago nobody had antibiotics. Nobody had cars. Nobody had electricity. Nobody had the iPhone. All of these things are inventions that have made us wealthier as a species.
Today, I would rather be a poor person in a First World country, than be a rich person in Louis the XIV’s France. I’d rather be a poor person today than aristocrat back then. That’s because of wealth creation.
The engine of technology is science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance. So, I think fundamentally everybody can be wealthy.
…imagine if everybody had the knowledge of a good software engineer and a good hardware engineer. If you could go out there, and you could build robots, and computers, and bridges, and program them. Let’s say every human knew how to do that.
What do you think society would look like in 20 years? My guess is what would happen is we would build robots, machines, software and hardware to do everything. We would all be living in massive abundance.
We would essentially be retired, in the sense that none of us would have to work for any of the basics. We’d even have robotic nurses. We’d have machine driven hospitals. We’d have self-driving cars. We’d have farms that are 100% automated. We’d have clean energy.
At that point, we could use technology breakthroughs to get everything that we wanted. If anyone is still working at that point, they’re working as a form of expressing their creativity. They’re working because it’s in them to contribute, and to build and design things.