Sue – I really appreciate all the work you do to inspire big conversations around how we can collectively save our planet and humanity. Thank you for all you’re doing!
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It’s January 1, 2050. We’ve saved humanity and as a result, we’ve saved the world.
This story begins in the 2020s, the decade when the AI revolution first took flight, heralding in an era of optimism for the future.
Many of our most brilliant minds were focused on advancing AI to align with human values and ushering in the promises of new industries and job opportunities, a leap in human longevity, and a clear path towards solving climate change.
With the dawn of a new AI-powered reality, an equally damming future loomed — one where runaway AI became misaligned with humanity. We saw Misalignment Museums pop up around the globe, warning us of the perils in the form of sobering tributes from AI to humans that read Sorry for killing most of humanity.
“Trend carefully on the way to the promise land,” these museums cautioned.
And yet, the real undercurrent of danger was rarely spoken of among the AI community: aligning AI with humanity’s intended goals assumed that we had the right goals in mind. In the century following the Industrial Revolution, we saw a significant shift in societal values, prioritizing economic growth and technological advancement above all else. Rather than focus on the long-term well-being of our civilization, we were rewarded for short-term gain and wealth accumulation.
The reality was that the goals that AI was being aligned to did not universally benefit humanity — most of all, not our collective psychological well-being. While we’d raised the baseline for our material worlds, our inner worlds were more dysregulated than ever. Without a realignment in humanity’s true values, we were on a fast train headed towards a new world order that would enslave humans to AI.
Psychology up until then had focused on curing the pathologies of anxiety and depression, attempting to move us from -1 to 0. While this work was absolutely critical, we spent little time considering what happened once we reached 0. It was not enough to simply pursue arriving at baseline — what about moving from -1 to 1? That path was going to look entirely different. Reducing suffering was just the first step of raising the bar for our existence.
The bleak truth was that as we edged towards the birth of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), we found ourselves devolving into mass disembodiment, struggling to even make our way to baseline. We traded our humanity for professionalism, tying our identities to our productivity levels and dissociating from our purest ambitions in exchange for high status promotions and salary raises. “Just one more promotion and raise until I’ve made it,” we told ourselves as we developed email apnea, computer vision syndrome, and tech neck. Our bodies were keeping the score, fighting bouts of chronic illness as we competed in games that didn’t serve our flourishing.
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Up against a world that had become exceedingly out of touch with our human nature, I convened a group of dreamers, writers, builders, and educators to reimagine what human flourishing in the 21st century would look like — first by seeking collaborators through my Substack, More Myself. We got to work on breathing life into a future for humanity and the advancement of becoming more human and psychologically resilient. We strove to save humanity from itself by finding our way back to ourselves, enlisting AI to help.
We knew that building this world started from within. The first step was reducing human suffering by leveraging the help of AI to make inner work more accessible than it had been in the old paradigm, programing AI to help deprogram ourselves.
In the early days, we used emotional work tools like Thyself, Refract, and Hidden Premise Finder to get back in touch with ourselves. We knew that by doing “the work,” we would reconnect with freer versions of ourselves after a lifetime of getting caught up in the same rat race that society ran on.
With the help of AI emotional guides, we began resolving inner conflict that plagued us and started transitioning our ambition fuel sources from dirty fuel (a lack of worthiness and a desire to prove ourselves to stoke our ego) to clean fuel (an alignment of our ego, soul, and will).
We found that when we operated from a place of baseline worthiness and enoughness, we had the capacity to tap into our most genuine desires and become far more ambitious than ever before, betting on ourselves to be the ones to save humanity rather than tie ourselves to more prestigious and high earning jobs in the short term.
With our commitment and focus to redefining human flourishing in the 21st century, we wrote, organized, educated and led a movement from the ground up. We educated people on why reconnecting with our intuition was so critical to our well-being and ultimately saving the world. We organized movements like tech sabbaths to remedy the polarization brought about by Web 2, championed a resurgence of town square gatherings by bringing communities and neighbors together in person, partnered with companies that were bringing the conversation around prioritizing our metabolic health to the forefront, and created reference points for what more intentional living looked like in modern day. All of this made possible as we freed up our most precious resource, time, by outsourcing non-essential tasks to AI, enabling us to scale our small and ambitious team to lead a collective awakening.
Grassroots change emerged as narratives were rewritten — it rose upward grabbing the attention of people in power. As we-the-people became more deeply in tune with the world we could live in, we demanded sweeping changes from our leaders, starting with their psychological well-being.
It had become abundantly clear the leaders that held high offices at the national and global level made economic and political decisions that caused immense suffering, all driven by their egos and a lack of attunement to our collective well-being.
While historically, there was no physical or psychological fitness test administered to high ranking officials and Commander in Chiefs, we-the-people demanded higher standards for our leaders and implemented requirements for baseline introspection work for those who held the fate of our lives and humanity in the palm of their hands. Rather than voting in politicians for their party affiliation, we began to vote for those who had the interest of humanity at the top of their agenda.
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As leaders across the world turned inward, they realized just how much suffering their rhetoric and policies had caused, vowing to use their power for more collaborative partnerships across the aisle in their respective countries and with other world leaders. Their efforts in transitioning their ambition sources to clean fuel led to positive sum polices and programs at the planetary level.
As this work happened, a new reality emerged in the 2030s: without cooperative efforts across the world, AI would rise to the top of a new world order — it was only a matter of time. The fate of humanity hung in the balance. Rather than continue to strive towards world dominance, our world leaders united around enacting policies that put our planet and humanity above individual countries thriving at the expense of others.
In the end, all it took was being on the brink of extinction caused by the very thing we had created. With unified world leadership and collaborative efforts in transforming AI to work for humanity, Misalignment Museums became relics of the past.
And there you have it. We saved the world by first saving ourselves.