We are the Dumbest We'll Ever Be
Humanity is gaining sentience 🧠🤯
Compared to future humans, we are like little babies.
Skeptics might say the world is becoming an Idiocracy, humans doomed to ever-shortening attention spans, less critical thought, and diminished innovation. I beg to differ.
Humanity is on an arc of radically increasing intelligence. We used to worship the moon, but just sent a lander there this week and it was hardly a headline. We developed the use of fire, language, mathematics, agriculture, telecommunications, computers, atomic power, and so on. Furthermore, with the advent of artificial intelligence, gene therapies, and soon BCI, we are in the middle of a rapid expansion in our faculty of intelligence. Not to mention our advancements in the contemplative practices (1) (2) (3) and the science of personal well-being (1) as well. The achievements of future humans will soon dwarf all our modern-day accomplishments.
In this article, I want to talk about this through the lens of three specific aspects of intelligence. These are the ones that are feeling the most alive for me:
Intelligence as aliveness (consciousness)
Intelligence as vision (ability to see the bigger picture)
Intelligence as agency/capability (you can just do things)
Intelligence is not just IQ. One way to conceive of intelligence, alongside Marr’s Levels of Cognition:
Aliveness (the why) → Vision (the what) → Agency (the how)
I expect all of these forms of intelligence—agency, vision, and aliveness—to drastically improve in the short, medium, and long-term time horizons. It’s a very exciting time to be alive. In this article I want to convey how, in each of these senses, we are the dumbest we’ll ever be.
Aliveness
Our average aliveness is kind of low, compared to what it could be.
We go through life on autopilot! We’re like NPCs. We seldom engage in independent thought, because, well, it’s computationally expensive to do so. When we are young we are told to go to school and when we are older we have to go to work. Unmonetized independent thought is costly and risky.
At school, we spend formative years learning to be tense, docile, and compliant. Bouncy, social, curious children are made to sit still and silent, and punished into focusing on rote memorization. I envision an educational system that encourages spending time outside, socializing, and following curiosity. I want to re-imagine education.
“I've never let schooling interfere with my education”
—Quote often misattributed to Mark Twain
After graduating, we learn that in order to get our needs met, we need to create value in the economic system. This often entails working long hours at jobs we don’t really care for. Can you blame people for going on autopilot, turning off and tuning out, to survive these lives of untapped potential? Where is the ikigai??
It takes a visionary to be the fish in water and still say “did you imagine it in a different way?”
Office Space (1999) is a movie about a guy who ‘turns on’ in this way. In the movie, he has this legendary quote: “I don’t like my job… and I don’t think I’m going to go anymore”. He just *does stuff* the entire movie, a great film about having high agency and going from being on autopilot to being incredibly alive.
I wish that more people had the social & financial safety net necessary to let go of the need to please others or do what they think system asks of them. To think critically. To wonder “what do I want to build? What could help other people?” I want them to find ways to make themselves happy and generate what *they* see would bring the most value to the world. I believe the world would truly be more productive AND happier this way. I envision more people spending time being explorers of the world, couch surfing with friends and delighting in life. There is a balance to be had between building and contemplating.
I also see the same people redesigning our surroundings away from a road-choked suburbia and towards one worth exploring, treasure in every corner. I think the world can be dense with beauty. If you looked at our society with a beginner’s mind, you would probably wish that people could enjoy walking around more in it.
Becoming More Alive
What does deep, vivid aliveness look like? Meditation and psychedelics are two ways of experiencing expanded states of consciousness where one is more present, alive, awake, aware. Many people don’t realize they could be experiencing radically greater depth and richness of experience per unit time.
These states of hyper-consciousness or hyper-awareness will be somewhat exotic to current humans. See the “space of possible minds” diagram below:
Limitless is a sci-fi film that demonstrates aliveness and agency as well. In the film, the protagonist instantly transforms from ineffectual to hyper-competent as a result of taking the fictional nootropic drug NZT-48. His first time taking the drug, the protagonist finds himself with unparalleled memory, recall, synthesis, and raw cognitive abilities. He writes a world-class essay using tidbits from a law textbook he barely glanced at years prior.
That first time Eddie takes NZT, the camera shows Eddie walking up the stairs and seeing… himself, standing at the top of the stairs. The scene viscerally demonstrates a feeling of metacognition, heightened aliveness, and literally of increased presence, as he’s present in multiple places of his mind at the same time.
THAT is intelligence, and it’s something I’m particularly excited to embody with the help of augmentative technology sometime over the next 50 years. Already LLMs are proving incredibly useful for self-reflection.
Another way the scene demonstrates a more alive state of consciousness: the entire scene appears brighter, as though Eddie is experiencing it with more depth and vividness. Often we describe moments of insight as though “a lightbulb turned on”. The LSD or mushroom experience has a similar quality as well, with the vividness of color being associated with a metacognitive experience.
This ties back to my very first substack post, where I wrote “the universe craves for us to experience it really bigly”. That’s the call to action.
Visionaries: It Takes Vision Not to Settle for Mediocre
What does being a visionary look like?
Vision is the capacity to see and comprehend things. Seeing the way a system works, you can easily spot a problem. Seeing a better possible reality, it becomes that much easier to make it real.
One example of vision is what happens when you combine multiple lenses and see obvious low-hanging fruit. (Agency is actually acting on it.) There’s lots of lenses out there. For example, AI + Computer Music: AI-enhanced DJ software, streaming-integrated notetaking software, stem-based visualizers, stem players. All these things *could* exist, but don’t. It’s combining the lenses and having your attention at the intersection that reveals the possibilities.
Recently MCP for Ableton came out (so that you can prompt Ableton directly), and that has me really excited. “When you have a hammer, everything is a nail” refers to using one lens through which to interpret all things. Once MCP came out as a hammer with which nail everything with, it was only a matter of time until it got applied to Ableton. It was low-hanging fruit! The awesome thing is that there isn’t a scarcity of good ideas, there’s a scarcity of visionaries iterating through the combinatorial explosion of possible lenses through which to see the world. 😎
Everyone brings their own unique combination of perspectives to the table. 💪
In terms of having vision, I think music as a whole is just getting started. Music has a profound capacity to transform and shape us, and I think most albums don’t do music justice. Again, part of the problem here are the misaligned economic incentives of the industry: profits over art. Regardless, in practice the problem is that 99.99% of artists don’t take bold enough leaps into the unknown, don’t have a fierce enough capacity for VISION to truly imagine music that’s paradigm-shaking. Studying the brain while listening to music, or paying closer attention to conscious experience, could in the future give rise to new parameters for us to modulate. Music that operates in a way entirely foreign to us yet is more effective as music than we previously thought possible. Music has so many parameters, and the way it molds us is so vast and unknowable, that one cannot overstate the difficulty of making truly great music.
Having Vision
It’s hard to see the whole system at once. This is much of what makes greatness hard. What helps is relying on cognitive scaffolding.
Cognitive scaffolding involves using tools such as frameworks and simplifications to increase your vision.
Examples of frameworks include how we can prompt LLMs “think step by step” or “create a plan for your implementation of XYZ” and the LLM actually does a better job. You can do the same sorts of things for yourself to become more intelligent. Rationalists use the learnings of the Scientific Method in their daily lives, following Bayesian principles to rationally update their beliefs. Philosophers use frameworks of formal logic to craft arguments with mathematical precision.
Examples of shorthands include the invention of the algebraic variable as in 5 = x + 2, what is x? As well as the invention of the alphabet for constructing phonemes into dense packets of meanings called words.
“You can’t solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it.”
—Albert Einstein
The discovery of new high-level heuristics that will unlock vast potential is inevitable. In the fields of science, medicine, art, music, AI, meditation, and so on. While yet inconceivable, these new ways of seeing wait to be discovered by us. And, the same way language did for us, their simplifications and shorthands make radically higher levels of intelligence enormously more accessible for our future selves.
While we have come a long way and have a lot to celebrate, the sad factor here is that, as seen in the tweet below, “stagnation is invisible”. The lack of tangibility means we usually don’t strive harder for greatness, because we don’t realize it is within our grasp. It takes a visionary (1) to “hit the target no one else can see”. This is where great art and deep innovation comes from; a paradigm-breaker.
Related quote on the wall at the place I’m staying at right now:
“Live in the future and build what’s missing”.
—Paul Graham
Agency
Agency > Intelligence
…
Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment
—Andrej Karpathy
Source: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1894099637218545984
The idea that intelligence is a single ‘thing’ is a bit misleading. I think of intelligence more like the sound that comes out of a modular synthesizer. It’s the product of many connected parameters: knobs, sliders, and buttons that all modify each other in complex feedback loops, rather than one individual parameter. In the same way, intelligence has many components, and they’re all synergistic: abilities of attention, planning, memory, cognition, logic, creativity, semantic mapping, cross-paradigmatic synthesis. The list goes on.
You can benchmark an intelligence by what the intelligence is capable of achieving in the world. This is separate from your internal experience of knowing (vision + aliveness), which you can’t really benchmark.
It’s not just about intelligence, it’s about how you use it.
I think of IQ roughly as a kind of “raw intelligence”. It’s just an imperfect test we made up, guys. Maybe we can make a better one. Actual intelligence, if measured by what you’re capable of achieving, is something different. They are only correlated up to a certain point. For example, people with extremely high IQ are often really low-agency, or do a poor job at intelligently applying their intelligence:
Coding agents are a great example of the importance of agency. A massive leap from ChatGPT 3.5, they are now remarkably intelligent about how they utilize their intelligence, and can one-shot projects of impressive complexity. And it will only get better.
Office Space, Lucy, and Limitless all show highly competent and agentic protagonists. I particularly enjoy the narrative in Limitless, where Eddie is extraordinarily effective in achieving any social, financial, or personal goals he decides to go for.
Conclusion
This post was about describing the arc of humanity towards increasing intelligence. In the future I might make a more practical post describing
The tools and technologies humanity is using to augment its intelligence
The ways for a person to augment their own intelligence.
There’s another post I’m working on that I’ve tentatively titled ‘Daoism vs Transhumanism’, with themes somewhat at odds to this one. It mentions harnessing the vast intelligence of the forces that created us (which are necessarily more intelligent than us, on the whole). I’m excited to dive into this. We tend to think of intelligence as this solipsistic thing, a sort of raw autistic computation that solves math problems to get you from A to B. But we are players in a game far grander than we could possibly conceive. And we are waking up to our roles.