I want to live in a world where we get to decide when we’re done. Where someone with years of curiosity left in them gets to keep going, and a family doesn’t have to watch a person they love suffer because we’ve reached the limits of what medicine can do.
I want more healthy time with the people I love. The ordinary kind, spent having dinner with friends or calling your brother because something made you laugh. Most of what I want more of would never make an impressive highlight reel.
And that wish extends well beyond my own family. There are people I will never meet who are watching someone they love suffer right now. The fact that I don’t know their names doesn’t make their pain any smaller.
A great deal of my optimism about AI comes back to this. I want us to become capable enough to do something about suffering we’ve spent generations having to accept.
The abundance I actually want
Private jets and mega yachts don’t feature in my version of a golden age. By my standards, that’s excess. I have a much harder time getting excited about another level of luxury than I do about people having a secure foundation for an ordinary life.
Abundance, to me, starts with a home where you feel safe, food in your kitchen, clean water, and access to care when something is wrong. It includes being able to make plans without wondering whether a war will take your home or your family away.
When someone gets sick, the family ought to be able to spend its energy on care and on being together. Having to calculate whether treatment could also cost them their home adds a kind of suffering we should be determined to remove.
There is nothing modest about making those conditions available to everyone. That would be an enormous achievement. It would change what daily life feels like for people who currently have very little room to think beyond getting through it.
And it would give the word freedom a lot more substance. Being told you can pursue your dreams rings a little hollow when every decision has to pass through the question of whether you can afford to survive it.
What would you do with a life you could choose?
I think about how much curiosity gets postponed because people are exhausted, worried, or simply out of time. An interest becomes something you’ll come back to when things settle down. Years pass. Eventually, it starts sounding like something you used to want.
Some people would keep doing exactly the work they do now, because they love it. Others might finally learn an instrument, spend more time raising their children, or try an idea they’ve been sitting on for years. A quiet life would be a perfectly good choice too.
I don’t think we should require everyone to turn their freedom into an impressive project. Getting to enjoy the people you love is a worthwhile use of being alive.
A person shouldn’t have to make an economic case for every hour of their life.
Work can be deeply meaningful. So can caring for someone, learning something for no particular reason, or being the friend who has time to show up. I want people to have more say in how those things fit into their lives.
That freedom comes with a responsibility to avoid harming others and to respect their right to choose lives very different from ours. We still share a world. But within that responsibility, there should be a great deal of room to figure out who we want to become. We should get to be the captains of our own experience while we’re here.
Give all this intelligence something worth doing
This is the human purpose behind what I’ve been calling The Age of Imagineering. I’m excited by the possibility that more people will have the means to act on their ideas. I’m even more interested in what happens when we direct that capability toward the conditions that keep people from living freely.
I want more intelligence applied to understanding disease and finding treatments that give people healthy years back. I want us to get better at providing the necessities of life without making access to them a permanent source of anxiety. These are enormous ambitions. They deserve a serious share of the effort we’re putting into this technology.
A promising idea still has to survive testing and become something people can actually use. In medicine, that means demonstrating that a treatment is safe and effective, then making it possible for people to receive it. The distance between a breakthrough and a person benefiting from it is part of the problem we have to solve.
The breakthrough has to reach the person who needs it.
A treatment most people cannot afford would be a scientific achievement with a great deal of human work still unfinished. I care about closing that gap as much as I care about the discovery.
The same applies to the larger promise of abundance. We will have to make deliberate choices about access and about how the gains are used. Peace will require human decisions that greater technical capability cannot make on our behalf. Having more powerful tools gives us more to work with; we remain responsible for what we do with them.
I’m willing to want more than we can currently deliver
There is a difference between accepting what we cannot change today and deciding it should never change. We have to care for people with the knowledge and resources available now. We can also refuse to treat the limits of that knowledge as the final word on what their lives could be.
That is the spirit in which I believe we’re entering a golden age of abundance. More of the limits on what we can attempt are beginning to loosen. How far that takes us will depend on what we choose to build and who gets to use it. I want reducing suffering to be one of the ambitions we refuse to put aside.
If we gain the ability to do much more, I want someone to feel the benefit when they take a sick child to the doctor, or when they sit down to plan a future that feels possible. Those are the kinds of changes I’d like us to count.
I don’t expect everyone to choose the same kind of life. Part of what excites me is finding out what people choose when fear and survival have less say in the decision.
I’m not done making plans with the people I love. I don’t want a disease to get the final say.
I want us to put our intelligence to work on that.
AI engineer, builder, and author of The Age of Imagineering.