Where We Are

There is a sense of unease and aimlessness in the Western world. All the most obvious eternal human problems have been solved in the Western world: hunger, shelter, and security. This is great. This is huge. Our ancestors wouldn’t believe it. We live in their paradise.

But it leaves us with a big void where once we had a coherent, unifying purpose. What are we about now? What is it all about, if not getting through the next winter, drought, famine, or war? What are we doing here? Where are we going?

It’s not just a feeling, a passing thought. Our internationally agreed-upon metrics tell us we have made it, that we’ve developed our societies as much as we can. According to the Human Development Index and popular parlance, the Western liberal democracies are all approaching perfect human development. They’re the developed countries. The developing countries, they still have lots of work to do, but we’re done over here.

Interestingly, many developing countries are more optimistic than developed countries, despite their people having much harder lives. Huh. Maybe they have a positive, concrete vision for the future (get as rich as the West, leave poverty behind forever), while we have…what? We have some ideas floating around about what might be a better future, but we haven’t consolidated them into a strong, compelling vision and a path to it. What might that vision and path look like?

Where to Go

The developing world can look to us for inspiration and aspiration, but we need to fill in our horizon. We need our generational projects, our transcendent achievements to work towards. What might they be?

We already have some pretty good ones:

• Building true artificial intelligence (AGI, or artificial general intelligence)
• Solving global warming
• Colonizing Mars

These are some huge, aspirational goals. How might we organize these into a compelling vision of a better future for everyone? The goals are certainly ambitious. These goals, honestly, might be enough to keep us busy for the next 25 years or so, through the middle of the 21st century.

The problem might really be that we haven’t quite committed to these goals. I’ll grant that colonizing Mars doesn’t have the most mass appeal. But building AGI and gaining mastery of the climate are universally important in ways that shouldn’t be too hard to explain. But has it been explained? It’s not clear to me that it has, not in a way that has swayed the masses. That in itself is an important project: painting a compelling picture of the future that we need to build.

We need a better story, a clearer destination and path to commit to. We have a few big goals, but it’s probably good to have one preeminent, generation-defining goal, something concrete and grand. AI is a general-purpose technology. Most people don’t care about AI existing, they care about the multitude of AI-enabled products and services that are starting to permeate the world. I’m very excited about it all, but it’s hard to sum it up into one concrete vision. It’s just a general way we’re going to gradually make everything better. And it seems to be well on its way.

So that leaves solving climate change. We’re a bit stuck on the climate change issue. We have a kind of false dichotomy that is keeping it from being as compelling and unifying of a project as it could be. On one side, it’s claimed that we need to sacrifice our living standards to save the Earth from global warming. On the other, it’s argued that global warming isn’t real or isn’t that bad and we can just carry on as we are — we don’t have to sacrifice our rich lifestyle. So, two options: we can make our lives worse or keep them the same.

This is kind of unimaginative, complacent thinking, on both sides of the issue. It’s missing the opportunities. It’s an overly limited conception of the possibilities of the future. The truth is, global warming is real and it’s fine. We can handle it.

And we can solve it while solving other important problems. We need to solve air pollution, anyway. Also, global warming is just the latest instance of climate change, which has been a recurring problem for humanity forever. Past ice ages and warming periods have been very disruptive to humans. So global warming highlights two problems we’ve long known we had anyway. It’s making it easier for us to choose where to focus our energy.

Further, solving global warming gives us an opportunity to do something really grand and transcendental, something epic. Realizing that we are affecting the planet’s climate is a big moment in humanity’s journey. It is a pivotal moment. We have realized the extent of our power: changing our entire planet’s climate on accident.

It’s tempting to try to pull back, to curl up and make ourselves small, to repent, to make ourselves less. To see humanity as a cancer on the planet to cut out. But it’s a little late for that, unless we have the stomach to kill the vast majority of the 8 billion people alive today. We don’t.

We must be courageous and move forward. We have to take responsibility for and clear-eyed control of the climate and the Earth. We can’t go back now. The only way is forward.

The Bridge to Infinity

Solving global warming is a great project in itself, effectively setting up a global climate control system. It will be one of humanity’s landmark, epochal achievements. But it doesn’t stop there. This will be a bridge to a new era for humanity.

Once we’ve mastered the global climate, we’ll have a greater sense of possibility, a sense of mastery over our environment. We’ll look around and see opportunities to improve our world everywhere. We’ll shift from primarily minimizing the bad to primarily maximizing the good.

We’ll think: hey, remember how people used to talk about revitalizing the Salton Sea? We could probably do that. And we could replenish the Red Sea, and fill the Qattara depression in Egypt. Those would be great oases and triumphs of human ingenuity. Also, wouldn’t it be nice to bring back some of the species we accidentally wiped out? The woolly mammoth, many Australian mammals.

There will be no end to the ways we can improve our world. And there will be no end to the ways we can improve ourselves. The ways we can overcome ever greater challenges from the local to the global scale, and maybe beyond, becoming ever more powerful, self-actualized individuals and communities, leveling up again and again. Expanding, growing, developing, flourishing. In making our world stronger and more resilient, we will make ourselves stronger and more resilient.

New threats will emerge, too, of course. Some kind of new environmental issue will emerge, surely. Or something like a huge volcano eruption or asteroid. But we’ll have a gradually improving ability to handle problems even at huge scales. We could still all be wiped out by something we can’t avoid at some point. We’ll always have that risk. But it will be a hell of an adventure to overcome a lot of challenges and do a lot of great things in the meantime. We’re a heroic kind, us humans. We keep facing catastrophe and scrambling out of it just in time. And somehow, we emerge having built a little better world. That’s our never-ending hero’s journey, and we won’t stop until the lights go out.