Crowdsourcing the Future
Don't give me your money $$$. Give me your ideas 💡💡💡!
Humans are not just humans.
Humans are a society. A community of billions. An organism.
More like ants.
Sometimes we feel like the spiders, everyone for themselves.
But really, we’re more like the ants. Forming groups and battling it out in an infinite quest for supremacy.
It can go a couple of ways though.
According to Tim Urban, when groups of people band together in blind obedience to a leader or an ideology, the human organism they form is a Golem. It looks like this:
Wars are fought between Golems.
More generally, it’s any group of people living in an Echo Chamber with an Us vs Them mentality.
If you don’t want to be part of a Golem, the other option is to join a Genie.
Genies emerge from what Urban calls “Idea Lab culture”. “A multi-mind thinking system that’s superior to any of its individual members at learning new things and separating truth from fiction.”
Members of a Genie don’t mind being contradicted because they’re interested in rooting out bias using collective thought.
Both Golems and Genies exist in the world. Can’t do much about that.
But maybe there’s something above that. Something even greater than the organisms formed by likeminded groups of people.
Humanity as a whole, bumbling its way through the ages.
Moving through stages of growth more or less blindly. Developing according to the environment and its innate nature like a creature that’s born and grows into what it was always destined to be.
Let’s look back.
A couple million years ago, we evolved into upright, nude apes that started painting the walls, cooking dinner, and getting dressed.
We also got much better at talking to each other. A knack for cooperation meant we began to dominate the food chain and some parts of the natural environment.
Enough to spread across the Earth.
At the end of the last ice age, we figured out that we could decide where our food grew and grazed and that made it much easier to hunt and gather, except we started calling it farming.
Some individuals no longer needed to provide for their own basic needs. They could do other jobs. Our conversations continued to get more complex, and writing them down meant knowledge wasn’t lost from one generation to the next.
The exchange of goods grew into a market. We invented money. People began to specialize and industry emerged.
Some people became philosophers and scientists and we developed a much deeper understanding of the world, the universe, and our place in it.
Technology is driving us into the future.
In summary, our (over-simplified) species growth went like this:
Hunter gatherer ➡️ Agriculture ➡️ Industry ➡️ Science ➡️ Technology ➡️ ➡️ ➡️
This isn’t about Golems and Genies, because these broad strokes carried pretty much all of humanity with them.
Is that the only way it could have gone?
🤷🏽♀️
It’s the way it went. The only example we have.
Was it orchestrated at all? Were conscious decisions made? Did we, as a species have any agency in our destiny?
Again, not sure. Even if we did, it would probably be accidental, just as we are accidentally cooking ourselves out of a nice home right now.
Because, you see, it’s still on.
We’re still bumbling more-or-less blindly along, into the next great leap, or chasm, depending on how it plays out….
Or are we?
Sure, there are Golems fighting each other in the name of some subjective reality they deeply believe in. There are Genies questioning one another and raising the level of thought and enquiry.
But something is different.
We have a brain.
The Internet.
OK, not quite. If, as Tomás Pueyo posits, we are neurons, and the connections we make with other people are all brains, then we’re still just a bunch of Genies, at best.
But my point is that we have the technology to be more connected than ever. We have social media networks that give voices to almost anyone, and by our interactions with those voices, we raise up the ones we want to hear most.
So, if we have this unprecedented ability to drive our own ship, can we do it consciously?
Can we choose the drivers, not by our votes on polling day, but by where we put our attention?
Can we imagine the world we want to live in and steer towards it?
Well, if we’re going with the analogy of humanity as an organism, maybe think a little about how you drive your own life.
What strategies do you use to get where you want to go?
Do you set goals? Fix expectations? Manifest? Leave it to luck? Trust the universe?
Like it or not, those choices drive the small decisions you make every day, and lead you to destinations you may or may not have envisaged.
Thought leaders the world over encourage us to imagine our ideal destination and set our habits in accordance.
Some humans do a good job of setting species-level goals and driving towards them. Take Elon Musk, the most obvious example.
In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”
Sure, not everyone has the vision and means to make such profound differences, but we can all imagine.
We can all choose to live in congruence with an ideal that we want to work towards.
Remembering that your attention is probably your most valuable asset and currency.
I think about this a lot.
I don’t fool myself that I can be a driver of change like Elon is, but I can imagine, and I can give words to my species goals.
My ultimate vision looks something like this:
The climate is stable at a safe level for life as we know it
Medicine is personalized, accurate, and holistic
Science and technology allow us to grow and become more self-aware, productive, and happy (I don’t mean grow more or bigger necessarily, I’m thinking Type 2 growth as Kevin Kelly puts it - grow better)
Decision-making is broadly distributed, driven by experts in the given area
Relationships are more flexible; the nuclear family is replaced (or augmented) by the village
We care for nature and the planet
We embrace exploration and curiosity
We are not naïve to potential threats; we maintain the means to protect ourselves
We value happiness, kindness, and life
This is the background that went into the world I created in my novel, Journey to Kyron, or J2K. A story of future humans traveling to a distant planet, not to escape an ailing Earth, but because things got so good that they could.
But I’m just one neuron (or I could be a podocyte or an osteoblast for all I know). I want to be challenged. To change my views where they can be corrected and improved. To take on the ideas of others to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Which is why I want to serialize J2K and build its world and story in public. So it can be the product of a Genie and not one ant.
And Substack is the perfect place to do that.
Writing the draft, I spent my time online filling my mind with technology and optimism. Reading
, , , , , and , listening to Tim Ferriss, Russell Brand, and Brené Brown, and the myriad people they interview. I wrote it with their ideas.Hence the description of the newsletter: “Taking the ideas of techno optimists and turning them into stories.”
Moving forward, I will start to release some stories and articles set in the J2K world.
Joining the multitude of artists writing and releasing fiction in this way, I’ll put my ideas up for criticism and see what comes out the other end.
Eventually, when the time is right, I’ll start releasing book chapters, hoping they’ll be ripped to shreds and built back up again, stronger.
I hope you’ll come along.
Humanity *is* an organism but - especially as a writer of fiction I was disappointed not to see the arts and humanities in your account of the key points of our evolution, only the one mention of philosophy.
The creative arts especially - music, visual arts, dance, theatre, poetry , fiction - allow us to the hold the highest vision of how extraordinary we can be, while allowing us to connect through emotional responses and empathy, with each other, creating the sense of Humanity as a whole. It is the essence of Genii and draws us away from Golum-like behaviour.
A future vision that doesn’t incorporate the creative arts is an incomplete one.