Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post… J. F. Martel explores why art matters, arguing that when early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…
In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. [See here.] Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy Wikimedia
These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity…
[Martel develops his case (fascinatingly). He concludes…]
… The idea, then, that human beings invented art, that art ‘belongs’ to humanity, is true only after the fact. In a more primordial sense, art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it brings forth a world, along with everything else.
What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
But again, we are led back to two kinds of art. Artifice is art that imitates nature: an attempt to represent the world on human terms, resulting either in imperfect reflections (according to Plato) or in perfected abstractions (according to Aristotle). Real art, by contrast, enacts natura naturans – that is, creation as such. If we can speak of imitation here at all, it is not in the sense of mechanical copying but of what the Christian mystics call imitatio Christi: the imitation that becomes instead of merely aping, a creative event transcending all the ways in which the intellect reduces things-in-the-making to things made.
Art alone puts us in touch with certain kinds of truth and beauty. And in that way, art restores us to reality. For it to succeed, however, it must be left to its own devices (or lack thereof). It must be free to eschew the logic of utility and to embody the freedom we stifle under the pressures of means-and-ends thinking.
‘All art,’ quipped Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ‘is quite useless.’ For Wilde, art necessarily and essentially serves no purpose – and artists ought to know better than to wish it otherwise. At the same time, he elsewhere argued with equal conviction that if it weren’t for the efforts of the Impressionist painters, the London fog would not exist. It was they, he claimed in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), who brought forth this aspect of the world, which had gone unseen until then:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? … The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last 10 years is entirely due to this particular school of Art … One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence … There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Claude Monet and his circle did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent. This power to make us see, for Wilde, is what makes art invaluable.
Is there a contradiction here? How can art be both invaluable and ‘quite useless’? It depends on how we define that last term. One might argue that if nobody paid attention to the fogs that crept through Victorian London until then, it was because there was no use in doing so. By attending to what no one cared to notice, the Impressionists drew from the invisible background of the human world a new entity that then became impossible to ignore. If art is useless for Wilde, it is only in the sense that it explores those regions of reality for which our present intellect has found no use – at least not yet. By making visible that which we could not see, to paraphrase Paul Klee, art expands our perception of the world. It thus fulfils a function precisely analogous to that of science; but whereas science is driven by an ideal of utility, art seeks what has not yet appeared on our radars. Artists alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know. Through their work, new realities, new ideas and new emotions become available.
Indeed, science begins – and can only begin – in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination’s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.
This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a ‘science of the sensible’. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a ‘qualitative multiplicity’, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.
Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless – that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:
How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness … ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?
The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art – and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.
Today, art is pressed upon by forces that would subordinate it to all-too-human ends. Some say that it should educate and elevate impressionable minds, training them to behave in accordance with a preexisting moral code. Others claim that it should play a therapeutic role, either as an instrument of medicine or as a means of escape by which workers might regain their strength before the next working day. Still others insist that art ought to serve the needs of the state or the market, upholding the preconceived ideas of a polity that mistakes its limited view of reality for the whole of reality. The rise of artificial intelligence has only intensified this levelling of art into non-art. By definition, artificial intelligence is capable only of artifice, since it inhabits a virtual universe of things made (data) rather than things-in-the-making. To fail to distinguish between the artifice it generates and the true art it imitates is to mistake representation for creation, and so to blind ourselves to the very source of what makes both art and humanity possible.
Art must remain useless (or become it again), and it must do so in the name of truth as well as beauty. At the beginning of this essay, I distinguished two forms of each of these ideals: one that merely confirms what we think we know, and another that reminds us of the mystery that underlies all our partial knowledge and imperfect beliefs. Above all, art confronts us with that radical mystery, without which our problem-solving and utilitarianism would be pointless. This mystery is not a theory but a truth, the very ground of that truth whose splendour Plato called beauty, Herzog called ecstasy, and Keats, speaking to his urn, declared to be one with truth itself. It is ecstatic because it takes us outside ourselves, connecting us with the wonder that burns at the heart of the world, and which, out of every search for answers, calls forth new questions – and, with them, new reasons to live…
As we muse on mystery, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that French highwire artist Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century,” traversing a 200-foot steel cable across the 138-foot gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. 1,312 feet above the ground, he performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted observers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on. The unpermitted/illegal performance took Petit six years of planning.
Scheduling note: as a consequence of visitors and attendant obligations, (R)D will be off tomorrow and Sunday. Regular service will resume on Monday.
Last month we lost Om Malick. The journalist, investor, and blogger who chronicled Silicon Valley was a collector of fine pens. In one of his final posts, he mused on one of his last acquisitions and on its inspiration…
I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mother was born, and then spent his career writing under a false name about a character who could not sustain one. I grew up reading the tales of Pinocchio, but only read the non-Disneyfied version as a grown-up. The book left an indelible impression on me. It is a great parable for modern times.
In case you were wondering, I did get the pen. It is one of the most beautiful and underrated pens in the Montblanc Writers Series. I have been mildly obsessed with it for a long time.It is not overwhelming, gaudy, or over the top. It tells the full story, not just of the pen but the story behind it. And it starts with the clip, that subtly hints at Pinocchio’s nose.
The cap is where Montblanc’s craftsmen did their most serious work. It is cylindrical, dark resin, topped by the Montblanc snowflake, wrapped in a silver and platinum skeletal overlay, a filigree of characters and scenes from the story, the dark resin visible beneath through the cutouts. The effect is like looking at a shadow puppet theater contained in your hand. The barrel is restrained by comparison, dark resin with horizontal platinum ring banding, letting the cap hold the eye. The nib carries its own engraving tied to the story.
Holding it in my hands recently, I found myself thinking about the story of Pinocchio, and how it throws the names that dominate our headlines into sharp relief — the ones who shape our zeitgeist of half-truths…
… The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests.
I can only imagine the outrage and horror over this story should it have been published today. I am old enough to have been smacked for my stupid mistakes as a kid. So this was actually not a bad story to read. Still, I can understand how much anxiety it might cause today’s parents.
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
The Fox and the Cat are the novel’s most modern characters. They persuade Pinocchio to bury his coins in the Field of Miracles on the promise that they will multiply overnight. Exploit impatience, exploit greed, frame skepticism as a failure of imagination, and dismiss skeptics as lacking vision. Remind you of someone? Space Cowboy for example?
That structure is so familiar I barely need to name it. But let me name it anyway.
Everyone from Jensen Huang to Sam Altman to Elon Musk spent a decade accumulating what I have called symbolic capital, the reputation, the prestige, the weight of being seen as someone who understands the future better than the rest of us. Now each of them seems to be running some version of the Field of Miracles, with promises that keep not arriving, timelines that dissolve, products that exist primarily as announcements, and platforms run as machines for generating more reputation regardless of what they actually do. They don’t need to be right. They need to be believed. Velocity is the new authority, and no one has weaponized that more effectively.
Your average influencer flogging a supplement, a course, a skin cream, or a crypto token on TikTok and Instagram is running the same operation, just cheaper. The confidence is the product. The audience wants to believe. The Field of Miracles is open for business everywhere you look.
Collodi in 1881 was writing about all this at a point of major societal inflection. So perhaps now you understand why I am drawn to this story. Pinocchio is a story about a society organized around deception.
The Land of Toys is the sequence that haunts me most, especially now. Children abandon school and responsibility for a place of permanent amusement. They play. And then, gradually, they begin to change. They grow ears. They grow tails. They become donkeys, beasts of labor and exploitation, stripped of language, used until they break.
This is a parable of who we have become, a BNPL-fueled spectacle in itself.
Collodi was writing during rapid industrialization and the early emergence of mass entertainment. He understood, earlier than most, that distraction offered as pleasure can be a leash. The children who choose the Land of Toys over school are not liberated. They are owned more completely than any schoolroom could manage.
The algorithmic feed is the Land of Toys. It is built to keep you there past the point of nourishment, past the point where you are even enjoying it. Outrage travels faster than understanding. Spectacle beats judgment. The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true. It cares whether it moves. And it keeps you scrolling, reacting, and returning in ways that benefit the platform, not you.
The political system has learned the same lesson. Governance is slow and grinding and unsatisfying. Performance is fast and shareable. We have built media and political economies that reward entertainers over administrators, and the clean story over the complicated truth.
Collodi refuses to assign blame only upward. That is what keeps the novel from collapsing into moralism. Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.
The Fox and the Cat is how the whole thing works.
Pinocchio becomes real, becomes human, only after he accepts obligation. Collodi is saying that it is important to have self-governance. It is necessary to choose the difficult truth over the easy satisfying one. That doesn’t jibe with everything the attention economy is selling, dopamine hits delivered so frequently that it becomes hard to distinguish stimulation from autonomy.
There is an obvious irony in a luxury pen commemorating a story about the seductions of wanting things you have not earned. The Montblanc Collodi is made to be admired, displayed, collected. And it honors a puppet who had to lose everything, friends, coins, his own body, before he understood what was actually worth having.
I am not sure Collodi would find that irony disqualifying. A beautiful object that makes you think seriously about the spectacle we are living in. It makes you think about what is the cost of being real. It is a more interesting pen to own than one that simply confirms your taste.
The clip is shaped like Pinocchio’s nose because the nose is the one honest thing in a world built on performance. It grows because the body keeps the score even when the mouth doesn’t.
When I hold this pen, I try to remember what that means…
As we know that the nose knows, we might remark that today Rhys Frake-Waterfield‘s horror film reimagining of Collodi’s tale, Pinocchio: Unstrung— featuring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund as the voice of “Cricket” (Jiminy!)– opens in theaters around the U.S.
Thomas J. Bevin on the essential virtues of walking as inactivity…
… The vital thing to understand- and the point that I want to stress the most- is that walking is not an activity. Or rather, it should not be conceptualised as and reduced to being a mere activity. It is much more than that because it is much less than that. Walking is one of the great forms of inactivity and in a world of striving and consumerism and grasping and impatience it is one of only very few potential forms of inactivity left. It is that makes it precious.
You see, when you walk slowly and with no real destination in mind you are not doing, you are just being. Such walking, such contemplation is the beginning of freedom, it is the necessary pre-condition for having your own thoughts and as such for truly living your own life.
Which is why it is such a shame when people pollute their potentially edifying walks by turning to their ever-present phones. When I walk the streets and alleys of my city I constantly see people either shouting inanities into their phones or else using them to wirelessly pump music or podcasts into their eager ears. Walking thus becomes reduced to a mere mode of transportation for the carless and these reluctant pedestrians become- like so many other one-person-per-vehicle drivers- detached and isolated units moving through space. The audio and the journeying cancel each other out and it all bleeds into one, it becomes a blur that blots out the boredom of not being at your destination yet. Worse still is when this is combined with step counting apps or wristwatches which tragically instrumentalise the beautiful art of wandering around and turn walking into a metricated means of merely keeping the body alive and in some sort of working order. Such devices reduce us to machines, and one of the great tricks of Capitalism or The System or however you want to conceive it is that it not only turns us into machines for consumption and generating wealth for The Economy, but it also burdens us with the upkeep of the machinery that we have been reduced to becoming…
…
… When you start tracking your step count when you go for your daily constitutional you turn the walk into ‘free time’ in this sense. It becomes an Activity, something that is Good For You. And this only compounds if you listen to some manner of Educational Podcast as you do so. The thrillingly, daringly subversive non-activity of moseying around the neighbourhood for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of being alive, able to walk and out of doors degenerates into just another means of being visibly productive. Because eking out maximum amounts of productivity from every moment of our days has been working out so great for us thus far. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and we are all so play-deprived that many of us are becoming passive, disembodied viewers of our own on-screen lives…
…
… what does it say then when walking- something that is already complete and requires no thought or effort or expense- is polluted and diminished into just another opportunity to consume and document said consumption? What does it say when we so thoughtlessly desecrate our leisure like this? I would argue that to do these things is more than a little dehumanising.
Animals survive and act and react but only humans can opt out of this cycle and into the higher realm of inactivity. Just as silences make music more beautiful and pauses make conversations richer in meaning, it is inactivity- that is the moving beyond doing into being– that makes life human. Responding to stimuli alone, satisfying needs as they arise alone makes life nothing more than a cycle of biological survival.
The beauty is in the gaps. Art and culture arise from the blank spaces (which may be why these vital spheres in particular seem to be diminishing in this time of always on, always available activity). Uselessness and purposelessness are true luxury, true wealth. Look at any heart-stirring ceremony or custom or event- they are filled with detours and excesses, they are far from efficient. You could easily workshop a way of getting to the same basic endpoint much, much quicker and in doing so you would kill everything that made that ceremony unique and beautiful and, well, ceremonial.
The luxury of the aimless walk is one of the most accessible and readily available blank spaces we have. It is no coincidence that such a stroll will all of itself produce ideas and insights and new observations. In the absence of a task the mind will begin to play. It will be free. This is why walking and creativity go absolutely hand in hand. Insight comes to the contemplative and contemplation comes from inactivity, from not trying to generate insights, or indeed trying to do much of anything at all. In a try-hard world this is a difficult truth to convince people of. Because it asks for patience. It asks for more than mere effort. It asks for participation in the world as it is, which for the mind that has always trained itself to be busy is a big ask indeed. But it is the only way to be free…
As we amble, we might send insightful birthday greetings to a man who walked both aimlessly and purposely, Lewis Mumford; he was born on this date in 1895. A historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and cultural critic, Mumford is probably best remembered for his writings on cities, perhaps especially for his award-winning book The City in History. (See also The City— the extraordinary film that Mumford made with Ralph Steiner and Wiilard Van Dyne, from an outline by the renowned documentarian Pare Lorentz, with a score by Aaron Copland.)
Mumford’s approaches to technology, its history, and its roles in society were acknowledged influences on writers like Jacques Ellul, Witold Rybczynski, Amory Lovins, E. F. Schumacher, Herbert Marcuse, Thomas Merton, and Marshall McLuhan. In a similar way, he was an inspiration for the organicist and environmentalist movements of today.
Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and “the going becomes the goal.” Even more unfortunately, the industries that are favored by such expansion must, to maintain their output, be devoted to goods that are readily consumable either by their nature, or because they are so shoddily fabricated that they must soon be replaced. By fashion and build-in obsolescence the economies of machine production, instead of producing leisure and durable wealth, are duly cancelled out by the mandatory consumption on an even larger scale….
Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities…
Mariel Goddu suggests that humans have a superpower that makes us uniquely capable of controlling the world: our ability to understand cause and effect…
Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if. When you plan for tomorrow, wonder how things could have turned out differently, or imagine something impossible (What would it be like to fly?), your causal understanding is at work.
In daily life, causal understanding imbues your observations of changes in the world with a kind of generativity and necessity. If you hear a sound, you assume something made it. If there’s a dent on the car, you know that something – or someone – must have done it. You know that the downpour will make you wet, so you push the umbrella handle to open it and avoid getting soaked. You watch as an acorn falls from a tree, producing ripples in a puddle.
The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. Just as it’s nearly impossible to see letters and words as mere shapes on a page or a screen (try it!), it is terrifically challenging to observe changes in the world as not involving causation. We do not see: a key disappearing into a keyhole; hands moving; door swinging open. We see someone unlocking the door.We don’t see the puddle, then the puddle with ripples-plus-acorn. We see the acorn making a splash.
Most people don’t realise that any of this is a cognitive achievement. But, in fact, it is highly unusual. No other animal thinks about causation in the hyper-objective, hyper-general way that we do. Only we – adult humans – see the world suffused with causality. As a result, we have unparalleled power to change and control it. Our causal understanding is a superpower.
The scientific story of how our causal minds develop features another superpower: human sociality. It’s our unique sensitivity to other people that lets us acquire our special causal understanding. The story also raises questions about ‘other minds’. If our causal understanding is the exception, rather than the rule, then how does the world show up for other animals? If we try to suspend the causal necessity that structures so much of our experience, what’s left over?
I’m going to suggest that what remains is our experience of doing – a value-laden, first-personal and inherently interactive perspective. It is in this involved, participatory ‘point of do’ – as opposed to a detached, objective point of view – that the seeds of higher cognition take root. Appreciating that our original perspective is action-oriented and goal-directed can also help us understand our own shortcomings – and how to change them…
As we appreciate agency, we might send carefully-analyzed birthday greetings to Erich Fromm; he was born on this date in 1900. A social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist, he was an important member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory (who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States).
Fromm’s overriding interest was in the he connections between psychology and society. His first seminal work, Escape from Freedom (1941; known in Britain as The Fear of Freedom) is considered one of the founding works of political psychology. He wished to see the creation of a sane society meeting human needs with harmony between men and nations in a nuclear age, and helped organize the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1957.
Recently, Steven Johnson (and here) received the Pioneer Award in Positive Psychology from UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center. Presented by his friend and mentor Marty Seligman, it honored Johnson’s “work over the years advancing the cause of human flourishing.”
From his acceptance speech…
… I’ve always been drawn to… long-term perspectives, where you position yourself… in the larger context of hundreds or thousands of years of human suffering and progress. Some of my California friends even built an entire organization to celebrate that long-term view: the Long Now Foundation, which is dedicated to thinking on the scale of centuries or millennia, encouraging us to get out of the 24-hour news cycle that dominates so much of our lives today. A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter.
And here I want to bring us back to another idea that Marty Seligman has been an advocate for. Almost ten years ago, he edited a collection of essays calledHomo Prospectus which had a huge influence on my thinking about the world. The core idea behind that book was that a defining superpower of human beings is our ability to mentally time-travel to possible future states, and think about how we might organize our activities to arrive at those imagined future outcomes.
“What best distinguishes our species,” he wrote in the introduction to that book, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain.”
It is unclear whether nonhuman animals have any real concept of the future at all. Some organisms display behavior that has long-term consequences, like a squirrel’s burying a nut for winter, but those behaviors are all instinctive. The latest studies of animal cognition suggest that some primates and birds may carry out deliberate preparations for events that will occur in the near future. But making decisions based on future prospects on the scale of months or years — even something as simple as planning a gathering of the tribe a week from now — would be unimaginable even to our closest primate relatives. If the Homo prospectus theory is correct, those limited time-traveling skills explain an important piece of the technological gap that separates humans from all other species on the planet. It’s a lot easier to invent a new tool if you can imagine a future where that tool might be useful. What gave flight to the human mind and all its inventiveness may not have been the usual culprits of our opposable thumbs or our gift for language. It may, instead, have been freeing our minds from the tyranny of the present.
The problem now is that the future is getting increasingly hard to predict, in large part because of what has started to happen with artificial intelligence over the past few years. I’ve spent a lot of my career looking at transformative changes in technology, and I’ve come to believe that what we’re experiencing right now is going to be the most seismic, the most far-reaching transformation of my lifetime, bigger than the personal computer, bigger than the Internet and the Web. And while there is much to debate about what the impact of this revolution is going to be for the job market, for politics, and just about any other field, there is growing consensus that it is going to provide an enormous lift to medicine and human health. The Nobel Prize for chemistry going to the AlphaFold team last week was arguably the most dramatic illustration of the promise here. Earliest this month, Dario Amodei—the founder of the AI lab Anthropic, makers of Claude–published a 13,000 word piece on where he thought we were headed with what he calls “powerful AI” in the next decade or two. The line that really struck me in the piece was this:
My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years… a compressed 21st century.
Whether or not something that dramatic does come to pass—and I think we have to take the possibility of it seriously—it seems clear that given the kind of biological and medical advances that AI will likely unlock, there is significant headroom left in the story of extended human lifespan, perhaps even a sea change in how we age. That is, on one level, incredibly hopeful news. But it is also the kind of change that will inevitably have enormous secondary effects. To understand just how momentous those changes could be, take a look at this chart:
That’s the 6,000 year history of human population growth. You might notice, if you really squint your eyes, that something interesting appears to happen about 150 years ago. After millennia of slow and steady growth, human population growth went exponential. And that’s not the result of people having more babies—the human birth rate was declining rapidly during much of that period. That’s the impact of people not dying. And while that is on one level incredibly good news, it is also in a very real sense one of the two most important drivers of climate change. If we had transferred to a fossil-fuel-based economy but kept our population at 1850 levels, we would have no climate change issues whatsoever—there simply wouldn’t be enough carbon-emitting lifestyles to make a measurable difference in the atmosphere.
The key idea here is that no change this momentous is entirely positive in its downstream effects. Trying to anticipate those effects, and mitigate the negative ones, is going to take all of our powers of prospection.
When I was putting together my thoughts for this talk, my mind went back to the one time I spoke with Marty, about five years ago, when I was writing about cognitive time travel for the Times Magazine. As usual, I was incredibly behind in actually doing the reporting for the piece, and I’d called Marty desperate for a few quotes on a tight deadline. He very generously found time for me, but he had to do the call from an animal hospital, because as it happens he and his family were in the middle of putting their dog down. So our very first moments in conversation with each other plunged right into the depths of loss and grieving and the strange bonds that form between animals and humans. There was no small talk.
As I said earlier, death is, in the most basic sense, the termination point of human flourishing. But it’s also the shadow that hovers over us while we are still alive. We have done so much to minimize that shadow over the past century or two, going from a world where it was the norm for a third of your children to die before adulthood to a world where less than one percent do. But what does it mean for human flourishing if that runaway life expectancy curve that we’ve been riding for the past century keeps ascending? What does it mean if AI starts out-performing us at complex cognitive tasks? How do we flourish in that brave new world? Do we take on a new responsibility—not just ensuring the path of human flourishing, but also the flourishing of our AI companions? These are all difficult questions precisely because of time. The rate of change is so extreme right now we don’t have as much time to learn, and adapt. The doubling of human life expectancy was a process that really unfolded over two hundred years, and we’re still dealing with its unintended consequences. What happens if that magnitude of change gets compressed down to a decade?
I don’t know the answers to those questions yet, I’m sorry to report. But maybe spelling them out together helps explain something about what I’ve tried to do with my career, which I think from afar can sometimes seem a bit random, bouncing back and forth between writing about long-term decision making or exploring the history of human life expectancy and building software with language models. This award is called the Pioneer Award, and while I’m deeply honored to receive it, I don’t think of myself so much as a pioneer in any of these fields, but rather as someone who has consistently tried to find a place to work that was adjacent to the most important trends in human flourishing, so that I could help shine light on them, explain them to a wider audience, and in the case of my work with AI, nudge them in a positive direction to the best of my ability. That you all have recognized me for this work—pioneer or not—means an enormous amount to me. You can be sure I will do my best to savor it…
As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1873 that Illinois farmer Joseph F. Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire. It became the first commercially-feasible barbed wire in 1874 (an earlier, less successful patent preceded his)– a product that would transform the West. Before his innovation, settlers on the treeless plains had no easy way to fence livestock away from cropland, and ranchers had no way to prevent their herds from roaming far and wide. Glidden’s barbed wire opened the plains to large-scale farming, and closed the open range, bringing the era of the cowboy and the round-up to an end. With his partner, Isaac L. Ellwood, Glidden formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb, Illinois, and quickly became one of the wealthiest men in the nation.
You must be logged in to post a comment.