Two More Thoughts About Us Humans’ Greater Potential

This piece appeared as an op/ed in the newspapers at the end of November, 2024.

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I have argued here before that we are better creatures than we think ourselves to be, and that our culture teaches us that we are.

My life’s work has been developing a “Better Human Story” that I think pretty well proves that “the ugliness we see in human history is not representative of what we are by nature.” What I claim to show is that the step our species made – about 10,000 years ago — onto the path of civilization inevitably unleashed a destructive force: a systemic force that arose independently of our inherent human nature, and that inevitably made our societies and ourselves more “broken.” (See my book, The Parable of the Tribes.)

One of the counter-arguments – — one way people try to show that I’m wrong – is to talk about what we see in the infant. Because the infant has just arrived from nature, it’s assumed to offer the clearest view into “human nature.”

And because the infant shows itself to be utterly selfish, this argument goes, “That’s what we inherently are.”

The evolutionary perspective offers a better way of understanding what we see in babies, and how we see ourselves.

Maturing Into Moral Goodness

There’s a good reason for the human infant to be completely selfish: born quite helpless, the baby is quite incapable of doing anything for anyone else, so it’s main job is to survive. That’s best accomplished by getting others to meet its needs. Selfishness at that stage is the species’ best strategy for a human community to get its DNA into the future.

From that beginning, the development of the young human from there involves getting woven into the community, incorporating its community’s rules and values. Our nature got shaped to begin life as demanding, selfish babies and then to mature gradually into a character shaped — by both organic maturation and cultural learning – to achieve a more life-serving balance between selfish desires and the needs of the community.

Things like love, compassion, a sense of fairness, a willingness to abide by good rules, etc. may not be evident in the human infant, but all of those tend inevitably to emerge with the maturation process. (Just as walking, speaking a language, sexual maturity, all emerge as the human life-cycle unfolds.)

The selfishness and amorality of the infant, in other words, shouldn’t be interpreted as demonstrating the fundamental selfishness and amorality of human nature.

The selection for what has been required to get human DNA into the future, over the eons in which our species emerged (before civilization), inevitably instilled into our species’ inherent nature a lot of qualities we regard as “goodness.”

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Designing a Life

People nowadays worry about the danger that Artificial Intelligence will render much of human work unnecessary.

Terrible news, it’s assumed, because people who are “unemployed” will live unhappy, empty lives.

But imagine what the peasants, serfs, and slaves of earlier times would think of such a situation: would they think it a “nightmare” to have a society that can produce an abundance of what people want while the people are freed from the need to sweat and strain to meet their survival needs?

On the contrary, they’d see it as wish-fulfillment of the kind we sometimes encounter in the old fairy tales.

And they’d be right: Human society could use AI super-competence to give people a major opportunity: to design a good life.

It is our culture’s assumption that a meaningful life requires making a living that makes “unemployment” a curse.

But if an AI economy distributed its abundance so as to provide for people’s economic needs, that guaranteed “living” would put the people of that AI world into the same position as the children of the superrich are in now.

The generations of people born into great wealth have known that they will never need to “make a living. That gives them the freedom to design and execute the lives they want to live.

True, not all have handled that freedom successfully.

But the important thing is that some people – freed of the need to “make a living” — do design and execute good lives. They’ve cultivated their gifts. They’ve found ways to contribute to the world.

Utilizing that freedom is itself a kind of art. Or a spiritual skill. One must be able to tune inward to discover what confers feelings of meaningfulness, and find the paths that lead there. One must explore what leads to feelings of living well.

A challenge, but — proven by those who have done it — not beyond our potential as humans.

The challenge for society — — if AI does greatly reduce the need for human labor – will be to raise its children to have whatever it is that enables those successful rich kids to live lives well-lived.

So enabling the AI world to displace us also calls for us to look more deeply into how the human potential – the ability of people to create lives that are full of meaning, without being “employed” – gets achieved.

So the challenge for society is to improve how well we teach our young to discover, nourish, and express their gifts. To tune in on their truth and live it. To envision a goal and a path to achieve it. To design and build a life that’s rewarding.