How do we realize human potential?
What we have achieved ... Where we are ... Exciting opportunities ahead
The Western world has experienced unprecedented prosperity over the last two hundred years. While decreasing as the proportion of the world population (from close to 14% in 1820 to a little over 10% today), Western European countries, with the addition of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, went from comprising a quarter of the world’s GDP two hundred years ago to generating almost half (47%) of the world’s output today. [Figures computed using Bard results]
In terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita, the contrast is even starker: the Western world enjoys a standard of living four and a half times greater than the world average and a staggering seven and a half times greater than the non-Western world.
(Incidentally, the non-Western world benefitted greatly as well, especially countries like Japan, South Korea, Costa Rica, and Mauritius that adopted Western concepts of property rights, the rule of law, free trade, fair elections, pluralism, and civil rights: they are catching up with Western Europe. Extreme poverty elsewhere has declined from 90% of the world’s population in 1820 to 10% today. Life expectancy has grown from the global average of 29 years in 1800 to 71 years in 2015.)
Many explanations have been offered for what Jonah Goldberg called “the Miracle,” the “utterly unprecedented explosion of wealth and freedom that accompanied the emergence of liberal-democratic political arrangements and capitalist economic arrangements in modern Europe and America.” Culture, religion, economic order, political schemes, historical circumstances, and technological advances have all been considered as contributing to the Miracle.
I want to explore another, somewhat underappreciated aspect of it: realizing human potential. It is a multi-dimensional challenge. There is a dimension of the number of individuals engaged; a dimension of how effectively the people are engaged at each contribution level: breakthrough, implementation, operation, support, or detraction; and a dimension of how fully individuals can realize their innate potential.
The numbers game. It is people who make progress possible, and people on the right tail of the bell curve who make innovation possible. To maximize the chances of a breakthrough, we need to have dozens, hundreds, thousands of talented people in the same situation, working on the same challenge, cooperatively. Once the breakthrough happens, many of them need to be able to pivot to implementation, to solve the engineering challenges and to scale the innovation or breakthrough to universal usage.
The West has made great progress in this area. From the beginning of civilization until the end of the seventeenth century, 70 to 80 percent of the population were plebeians, serfs, or slaves. They were primarily limited to the occupations of their ancestors, mostly involving arduous manual labor that didn’t leave much opportunity for realizing their full human potential.
With the advent of capitalism, the expansion of individual rights, and the abolition of slavery and serfdom, societies not constricted by powerful class or caste systems allowed that great mass of people to at least aspire to their choice of vocations. The Industrial Revolution was on.
There still was not enough surplus wealth to allow many people to escape having to labor for their next meal, and the old habits and prejudices took a long time to fade away. And, of course, society still discouraged, if not totally excluded, the female half of the population from intellectual pursuits. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, the size of the West’s population nearly doubled while GDP per capita advanced even faster, and conditions were ripe for the Second Industrial Revolution.
The 20th century saw an explosion in the world population, which quadrupled by the year 2000. The population nearly doubled in the West, while the GDP per capita quintupled. With the full emancipation of women and strengthened civil rights laws, the Western world in the second half of the 20th century saw the largest influx of human capital. It gave rise to the Information Revolution.
Economic growth in Western Europe has slowed in the 21st century (annual GDP growth rate of 1.6%, 2000 through 2022, according to Bard/World Bank) due to an aging population and a negligible rate of population growth. The United States continued to forge ahead at 2.1%, benefitting greatly from somewhat higher fertility rates and historically high immigration rates (Bard/US Census).
There was another factor that allowed the United States to pull ahead: “brain drain.” The best and the brightest came to the United States, permanently or during the formative years of their careers, starting with the years between the World Wars. In population bell curve terms, it was as though the US accepted hundreds of millions of immigrants from across the world: we got the “right tail” from India, China, and the whole of Europe without having to accommodate the rest of its population.
All these trends are now at an end. All the advanced nations are imploding demographically, and many countries are clamping down on their human capital flight.
Effective engagement. In his magnum opus “Human Accomplishment,” Charles Murray surveys the greatest achievements in arts and sciences from 800 B.C. to 1950 and summarizes “the conditions under which the human spirit has expressed itself most gloriously.” He identifies the prerequisites as purpose, autonomy, organizing structure, and transcendental goods:
A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.
A major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture that encourages the belief that individuals can act efficaciously as individuals, and enables them to do so.
The magnitude and content of a stream of accomplishment in a given domain varies according to the richness and age of the organizing structure …, the framework for the conduct of science or the arts and the criteria according to which a society evaluates achievement.
A major stream of accomplishment in any domain requires a well-articulated vision of, and use of, the transcendental goods relevant to that domain. [Charles Murray defines ‘transcendental goods’ as “the true, the beautiful, and the good.”]
Prosperity and meritocracy maximize the chances of breakthroughs and innovations: surplus capital allows investment into gifted individuals no matter where they come from or who their parents were.
In modern society, freedom of information exchange and openness among experts within and across domains is necessary: competition, while encouraged, needs to be productive and constructive. Access to cumulative human knowledge is crucial: one can reach much higher “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
To exploit the breakthrough and implement the innovation, multitudes of talented people need the freedom to pivot in their careers and choose new or different pursuits. In addition to prosperity and meritocracy, they also require safety, education, and self-determination: an ability to choose one’s vocation.
There are many aspects to safety. Beyond physical, there needs to be social, political, legal, and ideological safety: not being held one’s “assigned station in life;” not being afraid of the political ramifications of one’s work or expression; being protected by known and fairly applied laws limiting government power, enforcing contracts, and protecting intellectual rights; and not being artificially forced to adopt, support, and affirm a particular ideology.
There should be free or affordable access to education in a variety of fields and the ability to choose and change one’s academic path according to one’s preference and inclination. The quality of education must be sufficient to allow talented people to advance at their own pace. Advanced education and information exchange opportunities need to present themselves throughout one’s career.
There should be no arbitrary barriers to entry into one’s chosen field of endeavor, and individuals need to feel free to change their vocation when they desire to do so.
For those able to contribute to society in a meaningful way, to operate the constructs resulting from breakthroughs and innovation, the full realization of human potential requires alignment with the individuals’ innate abilities. In addition to all the conditions mentioned before (prosperity, meritocracy, safety, education, and self-determination), society should allow freedom of movement to go where the jobs are, government should impose as light a regulatory burden as possible, and employers should provide sufficient incentives and performance aids to maximize productivity.
Finally, those who are unwilling or unable to contribute fruitfully need to be at least prevented from detracting from others’ productivity. Most can be channeled into benign avenues of behavior; destructive elements should be isolated from negatively impacting society.
To support this edifice of effective engagement, there needs to be a government that does little beyond providing a level playing field for all participants; an economy that allows sufficient access to capital to fund promising new ideas and concepts, no matter how far-fetched; and a robust and flexible supply chain to deliver raw materials and manufactured parts wherever and whenever they are needed. Beyond a given country, the world needs to remain at peace, with open trade routes and free trade policies ascendant.
It seems unarguable that we are post-peak on most prerequisites for effective engagement. Pax Americana, which secured peace, provided safe shipping routes, and promoted free trade, is being challenged as never before. The “transcendental goods” have been discarded: society excuses the destroyers and celebrates the deviants. The crushing regulatory burden encumbers the industry; the soaring deficits constrict the availability of capital; schools graduate illiterate and innumerate students; colleges enroll students unable to complete their studies; academics are forced to write loyalty oaths to fashionable shibboleths; meritocracy is replaced by identitarianism; and governments acquire greater and greater power over their citizens.
Realizing individual potential. There are factors that prevent individuals from reaching their potential, as well as factors that maximize that potential. Sports provide a ready analogy: deformity or injury depresses expected achievement; advanced training regiments, micronutrients, and futuristic materials elevate an individual’s performance to its peak.
The factors that detract from the potential are effectively captured in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. All the needs must be satisfied to avoid diminishing what an individual can achieve.
The factors that can advance the potential to its maximum include exemplary parenting, optimal education, exact vocational matching, and precisely tuned incentives.
With the proliferation of two-earner households, parenting has taken a back seat to adults’ self-actualization, economic comfort, and hedonism. In the US, educational achievements in schools have stagnated since statistics started to be kept fifty years ago and, in recent years, significantly deteriorated. Active vocational matching has gone out of fashion since the 60s, and the decline – some say demise – of meritocracy means that the wrong people are being urged to go into the wrong fields for the wrong reasons. Incentives have been studied far more as a means of increasing consumption than improving productivity.
To summarize where we are in the Western world in general and the United States in particular: the number of people who can positively contribute has reached its peak and is going to decline for the foreseeable future; their effective engagement reached its peak at the end of the millennium and has been declining, with no sign of stopping; individual potential, to a large extent, is not being stunted by negative factors but the positive factors have either not materialized or retreated.
So, are we doomed? Are we looking at an inevitable imperial decline?
Not necessarily. I think there are still plenty of lemons to be squeezed.
Three areas have seen phenomenal growth recently with incredible and largely undiscovered prospects for supplementing and augmenting human potential: artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and neural augmentation.
Artificial intelligence can free up an unprecedented number of humans for creative endeavors and potentially can contribute directly to producing breakthroughs and implementing and operationalizing them.
AI can facilitate total automation of all menial, repetitive, and uncreative tasks. We already have automated routine, stationary manual tasks in our assembly lines, factories, offices, and hospitals (automobile production, chemical manufacture, copying and editing, robotic surgery). As AI-powered automatons improve their agility, portability, and discernment, they can replace humans in every endeavor involving rules-based activities: transportation, service and repairs, law, nursing.
The attendant boost in productivity and decrease in costs will more than offset any displacement or disruption the AI revolution will engender. (Think of all the Revolutions we reviewed above: each freed up masses of human capital while producing unprecedented prosperity.)
Intelligent automation is only one aspect of what AI should be capable of. Currently, the most advanced AI has the general intelligence level of a toddler or a small child (Bard). Once it starts learning as a child – which it is currently being taught to do – it will advance much faster and, sooner rather than later, will attain human-level intelligence. At that point, it will be able to contribute directly to achieving the next breakthroughs.
The AI can also revolutionize education. Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his tutor; the rest of humanity had to contend with less exalted instruction or mostly none at all. In our age, we have achieved universal education but it is “mass market” education, pegged to maybe not the lowest but certainly no higher than average level: barely sufficient for most, inadequate for all.
But what if each child had an infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely adaptable, and infinitely patient tutor? What if each human being could develop at the optimal pace and in the most advantageous direction?
I believe with the next generation of AI, it will be possible for every child to have his own Aristotle. This will fully maximize existing human potential (provided that the rest of society remains peaceful and meritocratic) and may even overcome the declining numbers of humans availing themselves of the opportunity.
A note of caution: a truly intelligent AI represents a significant risk. A self-teaching, self-improving being who thinks millions of times faster than we do every second of every day, has access to all the information in the world, and has an unlimited storage capacity scares the pants off me. It may squash us as we squash an annoying insect; it may keep us as a tolerated or even cherished pet; or it may simply ignore us as it advances beyond our understanding. But there is a chance that it may partner with us if it finds something in us that it lacks or has an affinity for, in which case we'll enjoy the greatest period of human advancement we could ever imagine.
Genetic engineering may remove physical barriers to full self-expression in the near future. There is no reason why people should be born with physical defects or limitations that can be easily prevented before birth rather than corrected after birth. One must be wary of "playing God" and starting to mock around with our DNA to create an uber-mensch, but preventing a congenital disease that we would have to treat after the fact seems a pretty clear-cut win.
Neural augmentation is a technology that improves human cognitive abilities: memory, attention, problem-solving skills, and even creativity. Most of the techniques, while incredibly helpful, still run into the inherent limitations of the human brain’s chemical processes. One area promises to bypass those limitations altogether: brain-computer interface (BCI).
Truly miraculous things are happening around this area. An AI can recreate a picture a person is looking at by analyzing their brain activity; a computer model can accurately play a song people hear using electrodes placed on the brain surface. Communication is becoming possible in the other direction as well: BCI is being used to control prosthetic limbs and video game controllers.
Soon, we all will be able to augment our brains with an AI plugged into all human knowledge, an AI that is an expert mathematician, physicist, or musician. How much more we'll be able to achieve with such help!
Allowing the human body to develop to its fullest ability, encouraging the human brain to utilize its inherent potential fully, and then augmenting the combined maximum with the nearly limitless capabilities of advanced artificial intelligence holds a promise of advances and benefits unparalleled in human history.