Zero to Infinity
This is essay 6 of 6 for 1729 Writers Cohort #1. Apply to 1729 today at 1729.com
Where do we want the world to be in 2050? Just a couple of grand, global plans to mind. There are the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which are basically about reducing poverty. There is Elon Musk’s plan to make cars autonomous and reach Mars (and more). Googling “2050 Goals” yields the current American plan to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, in concert with many other countries.
Where We Are: Aiming at Zero
There are two competing, opposed visions: shooting for Mars or shooting for net-zero. Outside of Musk and a few others, the West’s aim over the next few decades can be summarized as: reduce. Reduce poverty. Reduce emissions, reduce choice in energy sources. The Sustainable Development Goals are generally things everyone can agree on, but imply a focus on distributing existing technology more broadly, not advancing technology and improving living standards for everyone. It’s a big catch-up project. It’s a good direction and it does seem that progress is being made, but it is not enough. We need to do more. Jason Crawford, in his must-read review of Where is My Flying Car, summarized the issue:
There are many writers with optimistic visions of the future. However, the goals I most often hear are all the negation of negatives: cure cancer, eliminate poverty, stop climate change.
This is good, but it is not enough. We should not only cure disease and let everyone live to what is now considered old age—we should cure aging itself and extend human lifespan indefinitely. We should not seek to merely sustain current per-capita energy usage—we should get back on the Henry Adams Curve and increase it. We should not only seek to avoid worsening the climate—we should seek to actively control and optimize it for human ends. We should not merely get the whole world up to Level 4—we should be striving for Level 5.
Aiming only for the former, as some so-called techno-optimists do, is a poor sort of optimism. It is actually calling for very limited progress, followed by stagnation. It is complacency with the status quo, content with bringing the whole world up to the current best standard of living, but not increasing it. In this context, I found Where Is My Flying Car? refreshing. Hall unabashedly calls for unlimited progress in every dimension.
At this point, it’s not even clear that the Western countries want to progress. They seem to actually be planning stagnation or even decline with self-destructive actions like shutting down domestic nuclear energy production and increasing reliance on hostile powers. They are so devoid of confidence in progress towards a more technologically advanced future that there is widespread reverence for a teenaged preacher of doom (Greta Thunberg).
Where We Could Go: To the Moon and Beyond
In the past, there was always an urgent need to make things better. 200 years ago, almost everyone was poor, and technological advances were eagerly pursued. In the 20th century, there were the existential threats of World War Two and the Cold War that brought out the best in people.
It’s an awkward moment to make this claim, but humanity has gotten past most of its really bad problems. From here on, serious problems remain, but we’re increasingly going to need new motivation for progress. There is not as much urgency anymore, no immediate existential threats. There is an obvious one in climate change but we are working on a timescale of decades and progress is being made.
Perhaps after a chaotic but ultimately very productive couple of centuries, the 21st century can be a pivot into a more peaceful, less fearful time. When people explore and tinker because it’s interesting, not merely to put food on the table or escape death at an enemy’s hands.
Elon Musk says he is driven by curiosity:
Musk might be the model for creating a peaceful, abundant 21st century: engineers and scientists drawn to hard problems, pushing out the frontier and eventually enabling broad improvements in quality of life.
How do we get more of this? How do we activate all of the world’s talent? That’s a big question. There are interesting efforts to create global, meritocratic communities of people working on projects in a rigorous, competitive way. There is Pioneer, a remote startup accelerator, which seemed like a novel concept a few years ago but has quickly come to seem like the most natural thing in the world. There is Balaji Srinivasan’s 1729 project, which aims to form a global community of “technological progressives” to progress on important problems like longevity. The global scale of the Internet and continual advances in software for community formation and collaboration make this kind of effort a promising avenue for speeding up the rate of technological progress.