The Discovery Society

Author’s Note

Right now we're living in a threshold moment and our choices will ring out for generations. Every techno-futurist is screaming this from the rooftops but few seem to carve out a place for humans that is more than a receiver of cheaper products and healthcare miracles. I’d like to remind us that we built this – everything that supports our lives – we built it. The ingenuity of our ancestors turned trees into airplanes. They turned lightning into nightlights. They turned sand into computers. All of it was built from the bits and pieces they found laying around. We each have a mind. We’re each capable of truly incredible things. Our future can be infinitely more than luxury goods and cancer cures.

In this essay I hope to inspire you to think bigger. Those who care most for humanity frequently turn to fear at the prospect of change. We strive to preserve and protect what we’re used to but that leaves us outside the workshops building what's next. We end up simply making due with the results. Now is the time to step forward. Don’t doubt your own agency. This moment can be bigger if we allow ourselves to think bigger. For the first time we can ask, what do we want it to be, rather than merely, what can we cobble together. I believe we have the opportunity to not only cure cancer but to build a new chapter beyond our ancestor’s wildest dream.

I didn’t start with this belief in humanity. I started with a simple question. But after countless hours researching and studying the output of the minds that came before us, I’ve built an unwavering belief in my fellow humans. Nearly anything is possible if we put our minds to it. And finally, for the first time, we have the chance to really choose where we want to put our minds.

– Kai Barry, June 2026

Where did the future go?

This is the question that’s been knocking around in my head. Years ago, the future felt like it stretched to the horizon. I loved wondering what humans would do next. What would we invent? What records would we break?

But at some point, a gray fog rolled in. I lost my ability to imagine the future. I could go about my day just fine—make coffee, send emails, fix dinner, wash dishes—but I did so with blinders on, without lifting my eyes to what’s next.

That’s not to say I didn’t think about it. I would have told you I thought about the future all the time. Climate collapse, marching authoritarianism, surveillance capitalism, nuclear war, widening inequality, radicalized lone wolves. How could one not? There are too many threats not to be concerned.

But the best I could picture on the horizon was a dark cloud or a crater. What I’d lost was a vision of the future that might include us—that was alive, vibrant, better.

When I first had this realization, I thought it was just me. I’d spent too long staring at my phone again; I needed to step outside. But when I mentioned it to others, I heard the same feeling echoed back, amplified. It felt like we’d all lost the future. We’d been heading merrily toward it and then, swerve. Humanity made a wrong turn, and now the best we could do was brace for impact.

But what the hell had happened? Where did we go wrong? And are we really so far gone? I’ve set about poring through the works of thinkers past and present to understand. But more importantly, I’ve sought to peer over the horizon again, to find what we’ve lost and bring it back into view.

Dreaming of the future is a fundamentally human act. We are Homo Sapiens after all. Even as far back as 200,000 years ago, when early humans had to spend all their energy walking and foraging, we must have had dreamers. At least one or two, strewn about the savannah.

I imagine our ancestors sitting around the fire at the end of a long day—a lucky day, marked by a successful hunt—and now everyone is full and fed. I imagine one of them, let’s call him Gerald, breaking the silence:

“What if this was every day?” Gerald sighs. “Imagine if it could always be this easy. If we could light a fire like that.” He snaps his fingers. “If the buffalo came to us and we didn’t need to track them. Hell, imagine if the river came, too, right up to the fireside for us to take a sip!” He laughs at his own joke. “How great would that be?”

I like to think about the faces of his compatriots—the traded glances around the fire, the collective eye roll, the bitter laughs. “There goes Gerald again. What a load of crap."

But today, in Gerald’s far-flung future, all of his dreams have come true. The hunt arrives warm, between two buns, dropped at your doorstep. Water arrives crystal clear to your kitchen sink, with separate streams for hot and cold. And the fire lights, like that, every time.

We’re quite literally living in the wildest imagination of our ancestors. Their constant toil for survival is a thing of the past.

Now, imagine if we brought Gerald to the present day and dropped him down on 42nd and 5th. At first, he would marvel at the cars, the skyscrapers, the lights; then he would notice the food carts, the to-go containers, the singular genius of the edible ice cream cone.

But after the initial thrill wore off, he would start asking questions. “Now that you’ve solved survival, what do you do all day?” But no commuter would have time to stop and answer. He might get a curt headshake from one, a shoulder from another, while the rest hurried to their next appointment avoiding his gaze. Gerald would be left standing alone asking himself, “Why does everyone look so exhausted?”

It’s true. It’s perplexing. Despite having access to more resources and technology than ever before, most of us are still in thrall to survival mode. The average human has the energy equivalent of 200 humans working for them 24 hours a day¹; each of us is as powerful as a Baron in medieval Europe. But nearly 40% of Americans say they couldn’t afford an emergency expense over $400.² The median family has just $8,000 in their bank account³ paired with $80,000 in debt.⁴ When that bank account loads, most of us feel just as anxious and vulnerable as our ancient ancestors.

Why? When I consider this question, I’m tempted to respond with that same eye roll and bitter laugh that Gerald received. This is the type of question that is too broad, or too naïve, to possibly answer. Especially when we all have pressing tasks at hand.

But something in me won’t let it go. I can’t think of anything more pressing, in the long run. What happened to Gerald’s dream of the future? And what happened to our own? I want an answer to these questions. And I want to answer them in terms that anyone—from you and I, to Gerald, to our descendants 200,000 years from now—can understand. Because I’ve come to suspect that a clear answer is the only thing that will free us from this dead end and allow us to imagine a better future again.

So, in this essay, I’ll seek to accomplish two things: I will look backwards, to answer Gerald’s question: How did we solve the problem of survival, only to remain stuck in survival mode? And then I will look forward, to imagine a future that’s better: not stuck, not stagnant, not irretrievably doomed; but livable, habitable, and beyond our wildest dreams.

How great would that be?

PartIThe Past

Chapter 01The Survival Machine

For nearly all of human history, our ancestors were consumed with one task: stay alive.

Our species – like all species – operated in Survival Mode, scrambling to make it to our next meal. For Gerald’s generation, and 12,000 generations after him, this was just how things were. We had little time or energy to think beyond the essential questions: Where will I find the next calorie? How will I keep my children alive?

But, occasionally, when the fire was roaring and their bellies were full, our ancestors earned themselves a little extra time to let their minds wander. They had a chance to look around at the world and ask a more curious set of questions: Where do the herds roam? What makes a fire start? Why do the stars move across the night sky? In these rare moments, they point their attention toward the unknown. They could escape from Survival Mode into what I’ll call Discovery Mode.

In Discovery Mode, our ancestors were able to do something novel: observe, inquire, tinker, invent. They could do what humans do best: use their minds. Gerald might use his extra bit of energy to explore his fireside musings. He might follow a rumor to a strange rock formation and start banging stones together in search of a spark. By curiosity and luck, he might discover flint, or he might simply inspire his kids to keep searching. Discovery Mode was a rare luxury, after all. Soon Gerald’s stomach was growling again.

With each passing generation, humans used their stints of discovery time to make survival just a little bit easier. The discovery of flint enabled Gerald’s grandchildren and their grandchildren to cook, deriving more energy from their food and allowing them a few more moments in Discovery Mode. They used that time to discover that fire could harden spear tips and blades, which made hunting easier, which freed up even more time. Their grandchildren kept tinkering with the flames until they were building kilns and firing pottery. Now humans could store food and water for later—one of the many requirements for survival that they could now cross off the list.

Each discovery made survival one notch easier, which freed up more time, which led to more discoveries. It was a giant flywheel. It turned slowly at first, but ever faster.

Soon, we discovered sowing, then sewing, sailing then smelting. Before long, we were inventing aqueducts, astrolabes, then antibiotics. One by one these efforts came together, each building atop the last, each shifting a few precious hours from Survival Mode to Discovery Mode. This virtuous loop ran for 200,000 years, while we learned to harness the power of water, wind, earth, and fire—then steam, oil, electricity, and the atom.

The story of humanity, or at least its first chapter, is the saga of this millennia-long quest to solve the problem of survival. There are many ways to look at human history—as cycles of war and peace, of booms and busts—but this is the story that would astound our ancestors and hold them rapt: our long, collective triumph over the hardships that vexed Gerald and his contemporaries.

The construction of the Survival Machine has been the hallmark of our species. It’s the pursuit that has separated us from every other species – our common story and our common triumph. Yet it’s still difficult to grasp just how radical an effort this was—how it didn’t just transform our past and create our present. It changed our very vision of the future.

For the vast majority of history, any work that needed doing meant muscle and sweat. You couldn’t kill a buffalo, sew a shirt, or saw a board without putting in the work. And we only had so much energy to expend. The very first humans had access only to the energy in their muscles. Foraging for food yielded only about 25% more energy than our resting metabolic rate—basic breathing and organ function—on a good day. That surplus had to do everything—move us across the land, hunt prey, lift rocks, and carry our children. Needless to say, our ancestors were likely exhausted, in Survival Mode all the time.

Our progress on the Survival Machine, however, enabled us to escape that trap by finding new sources of energy. About 10,000 years ago, our species started domesticating both plants and animals, which represented a seismic shift. Agricultural societies no longer had to wander to find food, and horses and oxen allowed them to harness new living sources of power. While foraging humans could only sustain work rates of about 50 watts, draft animals could sustain ten times that, 500 watts, plowing larger fields and hauling goods across distances.

That tenfold increase would transform entire landscapes, but it was tiny compared to the upheaval that arrived thousands of years later with the age of machines. The discoveries of water wheels and windmills multiplied our work rates another eightfold to nearly 4 kW, the equivalent of 80 people at work. It was now possible to pack the strength of a village into a single device, where the force of a river replaced the force of muscle, pushing the gears to run a mill or a saw with a fraction of the effort.

This was the Survival Machine kicking into gear. Suddenly, humanity could get the same amount of flour or lumber, while freeing up that full village’s worth of people to go do other things—farm the fields, mend a shirt, or make a discovery. But the water wheel and windmill were just stepping stones. Next came the steam engine, which gave humans access to 400 times more power than the strongest human, without breaking a sweat. A generation later would come the internal combustion engine, then the atom, then the power of the sun.

But even during the 18th and 19th centuries, as the forces of agriculture and industrialization combined, the implications became clear. The discoveries we’d been amassing for generations weren’t static; they weren’t just a library of knowledge. They constituted a Survival Machine, which could operate in the world and conduct much of the hard work of survival for us. One day, it might even be possible to complete the Survival Machine—to eradicate the toil of survival mode from our lives. Which meant that humanity’s long first chapter—our fight for mere survival—might soon come to an end.

If humans no longer had to live like Gerald, spending every hour worrying about hunger or thirst, cold or illness, what would we do? It was now possible to look to the future, and see it as something distinct and different from the present or the past. We could imagine something better. Across the industrialized nations of the world an excitement began to build. It felt like we were on the brink of a new chapter.

Chapter 02What’s Next?

Through every generation of human history, thinkers have dreamt of what life might hold, if only we could figure out those basics of survival. How would we live next?

Nearly every culture and religion presents a picture of a land of plenty, be it on this earth or beyond. The Aztecs had Tlālōcān. Christianity has Heaven. Islam has Jannah. The Sumerians had Dilmun. From the ancients to the present, philosophers have likewise sought to wrap their heads around the good life, theorizing what it might look like in practice. Be it through scripture and ecstatic visions, or thought experiments and flights of imagination, humans have long sought utopia.

Following our utopian visions offers an incredible window into our ancestors’ imaginations. Plato’s concept of the philosopher king became the foundation for King Arthur’s legend. James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana in 1656 became the blueprint for the constitution of the United States of America. The most common thread one finds among our many utopian visions is the eradication of desperation and suffering, so that humanity can spend as much of our time as possible on finer things—loving our families, enjoying the world around us, thinking freely, and following our curiosities to their ends. Essentially, many thinkers imagine a world where we could spend much of our time in Discovery Mode rather than Survival Mode.

In the 19th century utopias became more vivid and detailed, and contested. The Industrial Revolution was then reinventing not only the world’s industry but its imagination. Humans all over the globe had spent millennia cycling through the same age-old struggles, but now the world was in upheaval. In just a few short generations, the prospect of progress had leapt from the fantastical to the real. The only question worth discussing was: how should we live?

It was in this period that Marx and Engels wrote their communist manifesto, and nearly every nation in Europe experienced revolution. It was in this period that the concept of utopia transfixed America, even as the nation ruptured into the Civil War. New communal societies like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana, and the Mormon founding of Salt Lake City began to preview possible futures. Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward sold 200,000 copies in its first year and went onto outsell every American book in the 19th century except Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben Hur. Utopias had become a battlefield of ideas, seeking how to live in a world transformed.

But even while humanity debated what would come next, the Survival Machine raced ahead, outpacing our imagination. We entered the era of combustion, of electricity, of modern medicine, of abundant food. Even through the brutal tumult of the Industrial Revolution, markers of health and wealth rose so quickly, in so many countries, that it seemed the Survival Machine was nearing completion. The average individual was spending less time in Survival Mode and more in Discovery Mode, and the result was a spurt of invention. Two brothers who ran a bike shop discovered powered flight. A traveling salesman invented the safety razor. A rancher’s daughter invented the windshield wiper. Regular people were beginning to make discoveries that changed the world. It now seemed that a better life wasn’t just reserved for philosopher kings or the chosen few. It would be for everyone.

With new inventions streaming off assembly lines in the early 20th century, it no longer took a visionary to imagine a better world; one could simply run the numbers. In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes projected that, within the next hundred years, we would simply run out of the need for humans to work so hard. Keynes calculated the rate at which productivity and wellbeing were rising, and the trends were clear. Mass production had now freed up millions of people to do other, better things while machines created the goods they needed. We would soon be able to produce more clothes, more shoes, more cars, more staple crops than we could ever need—for a fraction of the work. Keynes famously predicted that within a century, people would work less than 15 hours per week.

This was not prophecy anymore; it was math. And it added up. This, after all, was what humanity had long been pursuing: the realization of the Survival Machine. Over thousands of generations, our ancestors had worked themselves to the bone, each investing hard-won time into discovery and invention, so that their descendants could at last move on from the tyranny of need. We were reaching the day of arrival, when we would leave Survival Mode behind and spend our days in Discovery Mode, or whatever new mode we chose to invent for our next chapter.

Keynes predicted eight-fold growth over the coming century, and this calculation has proven right on the money. Even now, reading the arguments made by him and his contemporaries, I find the logic shockingly convincing.

The only counterargument to his vision is, well, this: the present, the benefit of hindsight.

We didn’t end up with a more utopian world. We didn’t end up in a future without work or without Survival Mode. Instead, we find it hard to even summon up the prospect of better days ahead. I haven’t been able to picture a utopian future in decades, but I can readily picture any number of possible dystopias.

Why?

Chapter 03The Wrong Turn

On a frosty February morning in 1894, J.P. Morgan trekked down to Washington D.C. to once again save the country from utter collapse.

It turns out that this wondrous Survival Machine, for all its accomplishments, also had a few flaws. There’s another way of telling our story from the Industrial Revolution onwards: crash after crash after crash. Just when things got going, the economy would collapse. Everyone would scramble for the hills and then slowly reassemble to put it back together again, now with new rules and regulations. But no matter what they did it just kept crashing.

Let’s look at the problem through the lens of textiles. For most of human history, textiles were arguably our most impressive and complex technology. Thread was a truly phenomenal discovery. Short, inch-long fibers are twisted and held together with only friction to create yards of thread. They are then woven into blankets, clothing, even sailcloth. But it was difficult, time-consuming work: For much of modern history, making cloth was our most time-consuming labor. Turning a flax plant into linen could take months. Spinning the thread to make a ship sail often took more time than building the ship itself. The reign of King Canute, the great Viking King of Denmark, was underwritten by the population of spinners who maintained his armada of ship sails. Today the control of nuclear material determines the world’s balance of power; in 1000 CE it was an army of thread spinners.

But before the Industrial Revolution there was never enough thread. We always needed more of it. Ancient humans, about 30,000 years ago, rolled the fibers on their thighs, and an expert roller could make one meter of thread on a good day. Twenty thousand years later came the drop spindle, which made us twenty times faster. Come the 11th century, the simple spinning wheel was discovered, offering an 80x improvement over manual spinning. But then in 1764, legend has it, a simple carpenter in Northern England knocked over his spinning wheel and noticed something. The wheel kept spinning on its side. If it could spin as well horizontally as vertically then more bobbins could be added. Eight bobbins. Sixteen bobbins. Thirty-two bobbins.

When James Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny was connected to James Watt’s steam engine the world changed. The Spinning Jenny became the Spinning Mule, a 2000x improvement. Nearly overnight the 4 million humans spinning thread in England lost their jobs. One machine could do the work of a thousand men and women, and the machines didn’t eat or take breaks. Something that once took months now took minutes.

This was when the Industrial Revolution started, and the Survival Machine roared to life. It’s also when capitalism as we know it entered the picture. By now, the Survival Machine had absorbed Adam Smith’s concepts of classical economics—supply and demand, capital accumulation, free competition—and it was time for them to earn their keep. For while the power of steam could run the massive Spinning Jenny factories, it took the power of capital to fund them in the first place.

The new combination would supercharge the Survival Machine, enabling it to pump out life’s essentials at an unprecedented scale. But, from the first Spinning Jenny, a violent debate began, over whether industrial capitalism and the Survival Machine were truly aligned.

Because it didn’t take long for the trouble to start.

The supply of textiles rose rapidly after Hargreaves’ invention, and then the price fell through the floor. In 1819, the UK suffered its first crash. It seemed like a one-off. But then it kept happening.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, all that cutting-edge industry kept gumming up. And the strange thing was that each crash seemed to be sparked by a new paradox: too much stuff. We made too much cloth one year. Too many ships another. Too many railroads the next. Too much of everything.

That would seem like a great problem to have. But the result of the gluts was financial panic and ruin. The fancy new factories were proving shockingly fragile. They operated on the principle of scale, producing things so cheaply only because they were specialized to make so many of them. They also operated on the principle of capital, funded by eager investors who would recoup their loans through eventual profits. And they lastly operated on the principle of competition, racing to beat out rivals in the hopes of dominating the market. The combination was a recipe for an all-out boom in production, followed by a bust.

The trigger point, each time, was a glut of overproduction. Those hotly competing factories would inevitably make too many goods. They would flood the market to beat one another out, then the prices would crater, the goods went unsold, and the factories were forced to shutter. All that capital investment now went to zero. But the ripples kept spreading: shareholders would panic, banks would fail, and workers would be out on the street. Now that factories had taken humans off the land, the jobless were stuck in cities without money for food and shelter. Amid all that wealth, a new kind of poverty was born.

This was the paradox of the new era, its constant chokepoint. The brightest minds of the day—from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx to JP Morgan—all saw overproduction as capitalism’s critical problem, and they devoted their efforts to solving the puzzle. Our Survival Machine was on the verge of completion, if we could just fix the flaw. As Wall Street tycoon Bernard Baruch wrote: “American genius has solved tremendous problems of production. The big question before us now is whether we can solve the problem of overproduction. We have learned how to create wealth, but we have not learned how to keep that wealth from choking us and from bringing on widespread poverty to the producers in the midst of their abundance.”⁵

From the first textile panic on, there were a dozen crashes in the 19th century. Each was met with a new fix: lending standards, labor protections, central banks, the gold standard. But each came crashing down again. At a certain point, a growing cohort began to fear that the flaw was something structural. To Karl Marx, it was clear that overproduction could only be solved by claiming the means of production for the people; only then could you rein in the flood of oversupply. Even ardent capitalists, like JP Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, were convinced that the issue needed to be solved by coordination; their solution was to create a trust among suppliers, so that they could prevent overproduction from the top. After a deluge of price-fixing and secret rebates spurred the next crash, we tried anti-trust laws. But still the larger problem loomed.

We citizens relied on the factories to meet our needs—to serve as our Survival Machine. But when they produced enough goods to alleviate our needs, disaster struck. Their supply had to be met with demand—they needed us to need. This created a paradox, as Lehman Brothers banker Paul Mazur observed: “American industry, in other words, has the odd problem of feeding those who are not hungry; of clothing those who are already warmly clad.”

Mazur wrote that line in 1928. Just a year later, the Great Depression struck, the biggest crash yet. Now there were millions of cold and hungry people for American industry to feed and clothe. But the machine was in shambles when it was needed most.

The bread lines were the last straw.

The world’s leading economists were desperate. As the depression sunk lower, they were willing to consider any option to get the machine up and running again. That became the sole priority. When the economy was running, it fueled the fastest progress on the Survival Machine in human history. But when it crashed, the result was some of history’s worst suffering. If they could find any way to jumpstart the thing and keep it running, they’d take it. Whatever that took.

A new generation of moneymen found its opening. They’d been watching the older generation battle back and forth about reining in overproduction. And it all sounded hopelessly outdated to them—like an argument out of the stone age. Why would you want to roll back all our miraculous production? The younger generation wanted to flip the debate entirely. There was another way to look at the problem—not as too much stuff, but as not enough demand. The better question was: how could we increase demand?

Keynes became world-famous for diagnosing the disease. But it was the banker Paul Mazur who best articulated the cure. The economy of the past was based on meeting people’s needs, and that was the necessary starting point. It had built the Survival Machine. But it was time to move on—and if we were bold we could. Because need was a terrible fuel for an economy; it offered such little demand. People only needed one house, one stove, one car. They only needed so much food and so many clothes. Need was a finite fuel—and once the economy had exhausted it, the system began to sputter and crash. We’d seen it a dozen times.

But what if we could switch to a fuel that never ran out?

This was Paul Mazur’s proposal. Don’t limit the wondrous machine; feed it. And he had identified exactly the fuel that would keep the wheels turning. It was something abundant, volatile, and infinitely replenishable.

Desire.

“Any community that lives on staples has relatively few wants,” Mazur wrote. “The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than by needs. And man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.”

Desire was the equivalent of economic rocket fuel. And we were going to pour it straight into the guts of the Survival Machine. Come what may.

Chapter 04The Desire Machine

After decades of fighting between the capitalist titans and the socialist scions, Mazur and his merry band seemed to have sidestepped the entire debate: Why not just give everyone what they wanted? Really, let desire run the show. If the thing that kept bogging us down was a lack of demand, then unleash demand and you would never need to deal with the sputter of overproduction again.

The earliest consumerists thought of it as more than a patch: it was an elegant arrival at the next chapter in humanity. All of us already wanted to escape the tyranny of need, and their solution offered just that. The Survival Machine would be able to resume running without pause, so long as we hooked it up to a Desire Machine. We could meet our needs, in other words, by pursuing our desires.

So, at that critical decision point, we chose desire as our alternate fuel, and we have been racing in that direction ever since.

As the new paradigm took hold, the economy began to boom once more. Even as more goods entered the marketplace, the problems of oversupply faded into the rearview. Businesses solved the problem by doing just what Mazur suggested—training the people to desire. They introduced new product lines and fashions; they cycled old models out and new ones in with the season. New industries roared into gear—advertising, marketing, and public relations—to teach the public how to spend. Meanwhile, General Motors introduced the first car loan⁶ and the consumer finance industry sprang to life. Each year it churned out ever more inventive ways for people to buy what they wanted now, and to worry about it later: installment plans, credit cards, payday loans.

Over the course of the century, humans became incredible consumers. Average household spending multiplied by fifty-three⁷ times in the United States alone (not adjusted for inflation). Economic growth skyrocketed, and markets stretched the world and back, raising incomes on every continent. Instead of the problem of overproduction, we now had a product for every problem. Nearly every imaginable issue or flaw could be met with a purchase, and every step outside the house presented another opportunity to buy. We learned to punctuate our lives, our dreams, our very personalities with the products we bought.

Mazur turned out to be right—prophetic even. The fuel of desire could jumpstart growth and keep the wheels of industry turning. The 20th century ushered in what can only be described as a Desire Society.

The only hiccup was that it wasn’t quite as infinite as he’d hoped.

The post-WWII boom was fueled by an explosion of spending. But by the late 50s, the economy was slowing down again. Auto sales dropped 30% in 1958 alone.⁸ It had taken time for industry to soak up all the existing needs and desires it could find, but the machine was starting to sputter – again. Luckily, this time, we knew the solution. When President Eisenhower was asked how citizens should respond to the potential recession, he answered simply: “Buy.” Q. “Buy what?” A. “Anything.”⁹ Desire was the answer. In response, airwaves filled with “Buy-now campaigns”¹⁰ and calls for a “national sales crusade” to encourage citizens to do their part as consumers. “Sales mean jobs”, “Buy your way to prosperity”—there was an air of patriotic duty to it. After all, so soon after the Great Depression everyone knew how quickly the country could split apart if the economy failed. The new reality, as journalist Samuel Strauss noted, was that “the American citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.”

Eisenhower’s “Buy Anything” drive worked: the economy leveled out and lifted off. The episode reaffirmed the logic of the Desire Machine: Spending could keep the Survival Machine purring and progress whirring along. But it also highlighted an important caveat: To stay in motion, the machine couldn’t rely solely on our existing needs and desires. Rather, it needed to create new desires, and funnel them back into the engine. This was what allowed it to run indefinitely.

But this meant there was some sneaky circuitry at the heart of the new Desire Machine. To function in a pinch, it needed to manipulate our minds, so that we would keep on buying.

As one 1930s advertising textbook crowed: “people are the raw material for manufacturing consumers.”¹¹ The industry’s mission was to complete the transformation, by one technique or another. Throughout the century, dating back even to the early 1900s, advertisers sought an edge by applying the new science of psychology to manipulate desire. Psychologists like Walter Dill Scott transformed advertising by codifying which colors, layouts, and font choices best sold a print ad. Freud’s belief in repressed urges led his nephew Edward Bernays to found the world’s first public relations firm, which succeeded in making bacon into an all-American breakfast food and marketing cigarettes to women as “torches of freedom.”

Even in the 1920s, advertisers had already learned that their ads were most effective if they could create a burning desire that a product would resolve. Yet the “desire” didn’t need to feel positive; an ad was often more effective if it created a feeling of discomfort, envy, or status anxiety. Consider the Listerine’s “Halitosis” campaign from the 20’s that featured Edna, a beautiful single woman tragically nearing thirty years old who could not detect her own bad breath.”Even your closest friends won’t tell you,” the copy read. Running next to a sad photo of “Edna.” The response to the new technique was tremendous. Sales of Listerine rose from $100,000 per year in 1921 to more than $4 million in 1927.¹²

These early ads look harmless to us today: they’re overloaded with dense text; the lone images are stodgy and gray; the persuasive techniques are over-the-top and hucksterish. But if they seem ineffective—that’s only because we’ve come so far. Decade by decade, industry has poured billions into honing its pitches, adapting their humor and tone, and tapping into our mental weak spots. Psychologist B.F. Skinner developed operant conditioning, using reinforcement and punishment to condition behaviors in lab animals. The ad industry soon found it worked in humans too. Each time the mind wandered off toward curiosity, advertising would refresh its desire to consume.

Fast forward to today, and you can see the same basic principles advanced to new heights. Just think of the attention economy. We have computers in our pockets with endless free entertainment. But the trade is that they track our every move, and they constantly tug at us: Look here. Do this. Be this. Buy this. Every major app is designed to soak up as much attention as possible, to maximize our engagement, to keep us watching ads, so that we can keep buying. With a single click, we can access any product, in every variety imaginable, with instant delivery. Even if you can’t afford it, there’s always a way to buy it, thanks to the explosion of the now $18 trillion market in consumer debt. That’s larger than the value of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Meta combined.

This is the apotheosis of the Desire Machine. But is that even the right name for its present-day form? Have we gotten what we desired? It certainly doesn't feel like it.

Along the way, we lost the idea that this was all for some other purpose. One can hardly find any hint today of initial justification for the Desire Machine—that it would save the Survival Machine, that it would keep progress going, that it would usher in a new chapter that would make us all better off.

That all slipped into the gutter at some point. Why?

When push came to shove, we were the fuel. The wrong turn cemented a simple paradigm: when the economy runs, it will lift us up; when it stops, everything collapses. The turn to the Desire Machine argued that mass consumption was all it would take to run the engine of the economy. But the catch, as we all became consumers, was that our consumption—our dollars, our desires, our attention, our minds—became the critical resource.

And so, whenever the specter of slowdown appeared, we would be called into service to conduct, as Eisenhower put it, our “economic functions.” If we weren’t forthcoming, then we would be coaxed and squeezed. We would need to be mined like any other resource.

This was how the wrong turn started, with just a slight push. But it was hard to stop. If the wheels of the economy ever stopped, we’d face disaster once again, so one could always justify jettisoning other priorities to keep the Desire Machine going. Advertisers justified their role of “creating desire,” even when it came at the cost of our curiosity and other uses of our time. Manufacturers justified all manner of waste, obsolescence, and pollution so long as it kept goods moving. When wages lagged, new forms of debt were justified to unlock further spending. The new metric of GDP was elevated as the north star for every president and policy maker—the ultimate scoreboard to track our consumption. When it began to sag, one could always justify deregulation and program cuts in the search of yet more growth.

There’s a steady corrosiveness to this logic. It slowly pared our sense of society’s purpose down to mere economics. And it slowly hollowed out our sense of people—of our minds, our purpose, our potential. As citizen was reduced to consumer, our chief duties became to pursue money and spend money. What’s more, as the Desire Machine advanced, this became less and less of an active duty. Advertisers increasingly spoke of customers as commodities to be manipulated and captivated. The ideal customer was “the captive of the producer.”

Where this leads, of course, is where we’ve arrived—an economy that outwardly treats our attention as a commodity to be harnessed, occupied, and monetized. While the ad industry learned to adopt and apply this worldview first, it has steadily seeped outward. It’s ubiquitous in the era of the influencer, where each of us stands to succeed insofar as we can capture attention, followers, likes, and subscriptions that drive purchases. The long cost of the Desire Machine is that we’ve all now become accustomed to thinking of others’ minds as a resource to be mined. And what does that make our own minds?

This is what the wrong turn amounts to: We attached our infinite desire to an ever-growing machine to keep it running, but now we’re realizing that we gave our minds over in the process. We sold our most valuable asset to keep the lights on. The incredible capacity that once noticed how wool fibers could be bound to make thread, that once discovered how to spin that thread through the force of a river, has now been yoked up to an attention mill so that it can make the next purchase to keep the Desire Machine running.

It's time to step away and ask what the machine is actually accomplishing. It may feel like we’re advancing a mile a minute but productivity since 2000 is nearly half of what it was the previous 70 years.¹³ Breakthrough science has fallen steadily since 1950.¹⁴ We’re no longer getting the promised gains, and the Survival Machine remains, through it all, incomplete. Instead, the chief thing that it is now advancing is waste. Desire might be near-infinite, but our planet’s resources are not. This is the ultimate stumbling block of the Desire Machine. It has kept on going and growing until it collides with another finite resource. It’s a simple equation that has nothing but a tragic end. If consumption slows then people will be out of work and the whole machine will sputter again. But if production continues apace, then our planet's natural boundaries will find their breaking point and the machine will crash.

We took a wrong turn down a road that will always end with a cliff.

So what do we do about it?

There’s a simple answer: we reclaim our most cherished resource. Then we build a society that supports it. We return to the path our ancestors were traveling and step into humanity’s next chapter: a Discovery Society.

PartIIThe Future

Chapter 05The Discovery Society

Let’s take a step back for a moment. What was the key resource that fueled humanity’s greatest accomplishments? The most important resource that built the Survival Machine? It wasn’t oil or lumber or steel. It wasn’t labor, and it wasn’t capital.

It was the human mind.

Behind every skill, advance, and invention, was a person observing, thinking, and discovering. This is so basic that we all know it on some level: our minds are the only resource that can make something of all the other resources at our disposal.

But we haven’t, collectively, valued the mind as we’ve valued other resources. We’ve been through gold rushes, oil booms, and financial bubbles, but never a mind bonanza. Instead, we’ve turned in the opposite direction. We’ve created new ways to consume the mind. We built the attention economy, designed debt traps, and encouraged near constant temptation. We tuned the Desire Machine to exploit our minds, either captivated by shallow distraction or captive to near-constant stress.

How did we end up going so far in the wrong direction?

It boils down to a case of mistaken identity.

Back in the early 20th century, the economists and businessmen who first hooked up the Desire Machine thought they were saving the path of human progress. As they saw it, and still largely do, the driver of our sudden progress was capital. This was Adam Smith’s discovery: if you took surplus wealth and reinvested it as capital—to fund new factories or research or business ventures—then you could get back more wealth on the other side. Capital investment made the mammoth factories that drove the Industrial Revolution; it fueled the invention and record-setting expansion of brand-new industries like the railroads.

The only hiccup, of course, was that industrial capitalism was prone to booms and busts. So this allowed the industrialists to zero in on a single priority: Keep it running. Do what it took to prevent the wheels of progress from seizing. Use desire to stoke demand and prevent the stall-outs. So long as capital was flowing and growth kept coming, how would we not eventually reach the promised land?

Now we know.

Those thinkers overlooked something very simple: capital wasn’t the magic ingredient; it was just what unlocked the magic ingredient. After all, what did any profitable investment fund? It funded minds at work. It paid for people to spend their time not in Survival Mode but in Discovery Mode: thinking, creating, inventing, and reconfiguring the resources around them. Those minds were what transformed a static investment into something more. Our discoveries were what spun the flywheel. They were the ultimate engine of growth.

This isn’t some fringe idea. In 2018, Paul Romer won the Nobel Prize in Economics for essentially the same paradigm. “Human beings … possess a nearly infinite capacity to reconfigure physical objects by creating new recipes for their use. … Alone, physical objects cannot drive economic growth. But ideas can.”¹⁵ The old-guard economic thinking treated ideas and discoveries as outside the model. They believed discovery was essentially a random occurrence. But when economists in the mid-20th century tried to determine exactly where our economic growth came from, they found that more than 85% of arose not out of capital investment but through technological innovation and discovery. We can shift around goods and equipment, labor and capital, all we want. But to get more out of them, Romer’s work showed, depends on our ideas and discoveries. They’re what truly drive progress: The more we invest in ideas, the more we all gain.

The truth, then, is that capitalism could either serve us or harm us. It served us when it helped to direct resources toward our minds, enabling us to produce and think and discover. But it harms us when it pulls resources away, soaking up our time and attention and curiosity.

This is what the Desire Machine has ended up doing to us in the 21st century. Its function is largely to occupy our minds—rather than to help us apply and develop them as we could. And, so, we’ve stalled out.

This is why it’s so difficult to enter Discovery Mode now. This is why we pick up our phones 120 times a day. This is why we stopped making progress on the Survival Machine. And this is why we’ve lost sight of a better future. Because we stopped supporting the one resource that could get us there.

So what if we were to unwind the Desire Machine and think about the mind differently? We all know, from our own undeniable experience, that our mind is a positive resource. We all know, from our own experience, that we’re capable of applying our mind toward a worthy end, to learn and experiment and collaborate with others in the same pursuit. This is discovery mode. It’s what has lifted humanity out of survival mode. And it’s also what each of us hopes to find at the end of all our scrambling and scrabbling to get by and survive. There is still so much around us, just outside our field of vision, that we could stand to discover and understand and share with others. Yet who among us has enough time?

That makes it clear what we need to do next: create a society for the mind, the Discovery Society. But what does that mean?

At its simplest definition, a Discovery Society is one that treats our minds as a resource to be supported, rather than one to be captured and squandered. This goal offers us both a path to the future, and a path back on track. After all, something like a Discovery Society has long been the utopian vision for humanity’s next chapter, if only we could reach it. So how to get there at long last? And what will it look like?

I think Romer stopped one step early. Ideas don’t appear from nowhere. They come from minds. Minds are the true asset of our species. Not horses. Not steel. Minds are what turned our surroundings into steel and draft horses and every other thing we’ve built. The mind is the source.

Economists have been reluctant to point to minds because minds don’t fit the math. The math wants things it can count – population is countable, steel mills are countable. But the value of a mind depends on what it’s free to do, what it can access, and what it’s equipped with. A mind struggling to survive is certainly not as useful to others as a mind working at the frontier of human knowledge. The variance of condition makes it very hard to create a satisfying mathematical model. So Romer claimed ideas and left the source of ideas unnamed.

If we name minds as the source of growth, we’re then forced to ask new questions. It’s no longer “how much capital should we deploy,” but rather “what conditions let the mind best produce.” This is what the rest of the essay will address. How do we move from our current society to a Discovery Society? The one-line vision is this: Every mind in Discovery Mode. We should be putting as many minds into Discovery Mode, as often as possible. That captures both the essence of a Discovery Society, and the route by which we can reach one.

Once we begin to value the mind, a new vision of the world unlocks. A life with less time in Survival Mode and more time in Discovery Mode is, on its own, a better prospect for most of us. But it also compounds: when people have the time and resources to discover, they have the means to create tools that will extend an even better life to all of us. A discovery society is a virtuous cycle. It’s a return to the flywheel.

So what are the steps to build a Discovery Society?

1. Respect All Minds: The story of the human mind is the ultimate underdog story. At every stage of history, large swathes of humanity have been underestimated and discounted. For centuries, smart thinkers wrote off entire populations—slaves, indigenous people, women, children—as unequal and ineducable. Yet every time we have extended the opportunity to learn and contribute, the human mind has risen to the challenge. The Desire Machine has unwittingly landed us in a new era of pessimism about the mind: a “Great Underestimation.” Even as more people than ever are able to participate in society, trust in the human mind has eroded due to the trend at the heart of the wrong turn: we’ve grown accustomed to viewing other minds as resources to be mined rather than cultivated. The only logical step forward is to rebuild our respect for every human mind, then sit back and watch the returns roll in.

2. Complete the Survival Machine. Once the mind is seen as worth supporting the next logical step is to finish the Survival Machine. In one sense this is a return to humanity’s age-old project; but it’s also, fundamentally, an investment in the future. We’ve had the means to do this for over 100 years but the existing Survival Machine always required a lot of humanity to keep it running. AI and automation will change this. Today, all around the world, we’re building a new floor for humanity to stand on, solving diseases, improving agriculture, and simplifying transportation. The ideas and processes are already in motion. What’s missing is a shared frame that makes this work visible. Once we see the floor we can begin to ask the next question. What do we do when survival isn’t the question?

3. Protect Our Time. Our time is valuable, we all feel that, but do you know what a minute of your time is worth today? With a solid floor supporting survival we need to find a new common goal. In a Discovery Society that goal is obviously Discovery. And for our minds to make discoveries they need time. Our next task, crucially, is to take back our time and use it to explore the world around us. We live amid an active bidding war for our attention. Every second is for sale. And we’ve gotten used to selling it at a discount rather than owning it for ourselves. We’ll run some napkin math to show that Discovery Mode represents, in fact, the most valuable use of our time. Slow time, time to explore and fail and noodle and tinker, is the most valuable of all. To take advantage of this we’ll need to revive a 900-year-old technology for cultivating exploration and then scale it across the world.

4. Open the Frontier. A mind without access to the frontier only produces what one mind can create alone. To put a mind on the frontier of human knowledge three things must converge, one, current knowledge, what is the state of the field? Two, working instruments, and three a community of minds working on the same problem. We’ll call this the “Infrastructure for the Mind”—an array of tools, programs, and opportunities that push a mind into Discovery Mode to the frontier. From the Florentine workshops in the 15th century to Bell Labs has enjoyed this convergence. What if we could put a Bletchley Park or a Black Mountain College in every neighborhood on earth? We’ve already built the infrastructure. We’re just using it backward.

There is no ceiling, certainly not one that we’ve ever tested. There has never yet been a society that has sought to discover the potential of the human mind. There has never been society that has invested in every mind, and given them the tools to keep learning and discovering. This is the key to the next chapter of human history.

Chapter 06Step 1 – Respect All Minds

We have spent much of the 21st century learning the limits of our minds. We’ve taken part in the biggest tech companies’ mass experiment, as they’ve mapped our mind’s weak spots in an effort to keep us staring at our phones. We’ve watched our politics decay until each half of our country has become convinced that the other half’s minds have rotted away. And, if we glance to the horizon for a moment, we can’t help but notice that the future’s most valuable industry—Artificial Intelligence—is pinned to the promise of surpassing the human mind and rendering it, more or less, redundant.

You could argue that there’s never been a worse time to consider a “Society of the Mind.” To invest in the minds of others looks a lot like a losing bet. A waste of time and money—a waste of hope, you might even say. We are what we are.

But we have heard this argument before—many, many times. History is littered with brilliant thinkers who have written off the potential of whole swathes of the population. Aristotle, godfather of reason, believed that some men were simply slaves “by nature.” Thomas Aquinas discounted all women as “defective and misbegotten.” The human mind has been a constant underdog. But rooting against it has always proven wrong—and it will prove wrong again. We’re in the midst of a “Great Underestimation” of our minds, and it’s time to break free.

Heated debates about humanity’s potential, or lack thereof, are not new.

In England around 1800, poverty and homelessness were on a perilous rise. The earliest effects of the industrial revolution were making themselves known, and food prices were spiking. A growing share of laborers found themselves out of work and newly displaced, shunted into squalid cities. The extent of the hardship was difficult for us to fathom today. The poor and working classes of the British Isles made up more than 75% of the population, and to the upper-class policy makers they represented a powder keg. Now, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, all manner of dangerous ideas were circulating to promise the masses a just and equal society. The British elite knew they had a problem, and there was an ongoing debate about how to reform society to ease the tension.

Enter Thomas Malthus. In 1798, he published An Essay on the Principle of Population, the work that would evermore give economics the moniker, “the dismal science.” Malthus looked out upon all the reformers of the day—the liberals, the radicals, the conservatives alike. He took in all their proposals, grand and modest, and he responded broadly: It can’t work.

Say you made life better for the poor this generation, Malthus suggested. Say you gave them a stipend for food or housing. What would happen? Well, Malthus argued, the one constant of human history was that population rises whenever possible. People have sex and they reproduce. And the poor, with their new resources, would do just that. They would reproduce until the point where they had just as many kids as your generous stipend would support. And at that point? They’d revert right back to the same level of poverty as before, but now there would be more of them.

The hard truth of natural law, Malthus argued, was that people could reproduce exponentially, but we could only draw so much sustenance out of finite land. As a result there would always be some baseline of misery, and any attempts to elevate the poor and the working class were just delaying the inevitable backslide. England’s charities and Poor Laws, Malthus argued, only served to “spread the general evil over a much larger surface.” For every individual they helped, temporarily, they wound up creating poverty for several more. Any other attempt at social reform would have the same result—be it unemployment insurance or pensions for old age. If we were clear-eyed, Malthus said, we’d see that misery wasn’t a bug in the system, it was the only thing that kept us from checking. The “goad of necessity,” as he calls it, “forms the master spring of public prosperity.” How could we possibly hope for anything better?

"The labouring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth,” Malthus wrote. “Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house."¹⁶

Malthus, for all his pessimism, was persuasive. He updated his essay a half dozen times to fend off every critique. And his ideas took hold of British society. For the entire first half of the 1800s, “Malthus hung like a cloud over England,” as scholar Humphry House put it. Every proposed social program or idealistic reformer ran into the same brick wall.

One of those idealists was Robert Owen, who would face off against Malthus and become known as one of the first “utopian socialists.” Owen leapt into the ongoing debate in 1813 with his treatise, A New View of Society. His writing was verbose but his argument was rather straightforward. Countering Malthus, Owen humbly suggested that the poor and working classes were capable of more than just sex, boozing, and hard labor. All people, Owen believed, were shaped by their circumstances, especially at a young age; and it was within our collective power to help shape people’s circumstances for the better. This was the foundation for Owen’s “new view of society,” a basic optimism about people rather than Malthus’s pessimism. What should we do with this foundation?

Owen’s treatise boiled down to a single proposal that was so radical in its day, and so commonplace in our own, that it hardly seems utopian or socialist at all.

His radical idea? Universal education.

Owen argued that we shouldn’t throw little Johnny into the spinning-jenny factory at age 6, and instead should give him a few years of education first. Even just a bit of schooling would stand to make Johnny a lot more dependable, and a lot less dependent. As a reform, it would relieve much of the burden of mass poverty and vice that so concerned Malthus, all by putting a little faith in the potential of the human mind. Owen, in fact, had already tested this very premise in his own textile factory, and as he outlined it had yielded remarkable results.

In the zeitgeist, however, Owen was branded the out-of-touch dreamer. Educating the masses sounded not just impossibly expensive but downright hopeless. Malthus remained the sober voice of reason, and his argument for pessimism would win the day handily. Come the 1830s, Malthus’s ideas would be used as the basis to finally reform the Poor Laws. But in keeping with his philosophy that improvement was impossible, the new poor laws were designed to make conditions worse for those receiving public assistance. Standards were deliberately low to make it impossible to mooch off the state. The policy’s intention was to make people fear poverty and work harder to avoid it.

The result was the Dickensian era of Oliver Twist: squalid slums, torturous workhouses, and a lost generation with no hope for any escape. All of this occurred in a period of unprecedented upheaval due to the disruptions of the industrial revolution. The combination created the century’s worst conditions for England’s poor, which subsequent decades would need to dig out of.

But, of course, if Malthus was the day’s victor, Owen was history’s. It took decades more, but eventually in the 1870s universal education became official policy in England, and it would prove incalculably successful. Indeed, mass education is arguably the most successful public program in the history of the modern world.

Because it turned out that all those miserable saps who made up three-quarters of the population were educatable. They were capable of far more than just sex, drudgery, and drinking. We just needed to treat their minds with a little respect. If we underestimate and undersupport the mind we are the only ones who lose.

Fittingly, mass education would help fund the very breakthroughs that proved Malthus’s “natural laws” wrong. He’d judged that human reproduction would always outpace sustenance, forever undermining our attempts at social welfare. But he failed to anticipate the wondrous discoveries that we would make: Fertilizer and modern farming technologies that would skyrocket the food we could get out of finite land. What’s more, the discovery of birth control would undermine Malthus’s entire argument: individuals and families could control the amount of children they had. His natural laws were really a failure of the imagination. If his view still dominated society we’d be without fiber optics or antimalarial drugs. We’d never experience the great stories of H.G. Wells, the son of servants, or D.H. Lawrence, the son of a coal miner.

Universal education is now so ubiquitous that we struggle to imagine that it was ever contentious. But history is full of examples of this same battle unfolding again and again.

Today we find ourselves in a similar situation. There is a palpable fear that AI may soon be smarter than any human on the planet. It may soon eclipse us and make us obsolete. Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, has said, “The people who lose their jobs won't have other jobs to go to. If AI gets as smart as people—or smarter—any job they might do can be done by AI." But even if AI is wildly smarter than us it doesn't make us obsolete. We’ve faced this before. A horse can outrun us. We didn’t surrender to horses, we used them to plow fields and travel to new places. The steam engine outpulled us. The factory outproduced us. The computer outcalculated us. Nearly everything in our world is “better” than us. Each time we panic and each time the outcome is the same. We build a new tool to increase the size and scope of what our minds can do.

This is the first time we’ve convinced ourselves that our minds themselves might be obsolete. It’s terrifying but it’s not true. That conclusion is merely a symptom of how thoroughly the Desire Machine has conditioned us to discount our own minds. We’ve been lured into a new form of Malthusian pessimism—where we tend to view other minds as limited and hopeless and vaguely threatening.

AI models are a far cry from human minds. An LLM just recognizes patterns within a known dataset. If you think of everything an LLM knows as a vast three-dimensional cloud of information, the model is remarkably good at finding new points inside that cloud—connecting ideas, filling in gaps, recombining what it knows in fresh ways. But it struggles to push past the edge of the cloud – to discover something truly new.

François Chollet, an AI researcher, former Senior Staff Engineer AI at Google, and creator of the ARC benchmark, AI’s most important testing standard, is one of the most vocal about LLMs’ limitations. His new company’s website reads, “[AI] excels at known tasks but crumbles when faced with open-ended problems. It reflects back to us only the knowledge, programs, and abstractions found in its training data. Like the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, it hides the fact that human general intelligence created the training data.”¹⁷ Exactly! Human intelligence created the dataset. All the amazing information AI spits back at you in seconds is information one of our ancestors discovered.

So let’s shrug off the Malthusian pessimism and borrow a bit of Owen’s optimism?

Every mind around you has the potential to add something new to the dataset. AI can send it around the world in an instant but a human mind still needs to create it. Imagine passing people on the street and, rather than comparing yourself or competing with them, you wondered what they might discover that would benefit you. Imagine asking what kind of support they might need to make that discovery. That is the real story of humanity. You and I didn’t discover fire or cooking or the computer, but we’ve certainly benefited from them. What discoveries are lying dormant in the minds around us?

Respecting the minds around us is a precondition for the building of a Discovery Society. It is the paradigm shift upon which everything else is built. What would we do differently—and how would we all stand to benefit—if we actually absorbed this lesson?

If we honor and respect every mind the next obvious question becomes, how do we free those minds to begin discovering. For one, we stop using Survival Mode as a stick and a motivator. We return to our longest-running human project—completing the Survival Machine.

Chapter 07Step 2 - Complete the Survival Machine

Once we commit to respecting all minds the obvious next step is to finally complete the Survival Machine. It’s the cornerstone of nearly every culture’s utopian dream. So why haven’t we finished it?

The most common response I heard has been the expense. “Sure, of course that’s the goal, but it’s a long way off. We’re still trying to figure out justice and equality. Supporting every mind, we haven’t even solved homelessness, we’ve got to be patient.” Most people seem to believe that extending survival to every human is well outside of our capability.

It’s not. American economist Stuart Chase announced the arrival of the possibility in 1932. “A billion and a half horses of mechanical energy, added to the time-honored stock of man and animal power, have at last put us in the position where, if we care to concentrate our energy, we can raise more food than we can eat, build more houses than we can inhabit, fabricate more clothing than we can wear out.”¹⁸ Even after adding 6 billion people over the past 100ish years we still have enough. GDP for the planet is about $174 trillion¹⁹ (in 2021 dollars). That's our income. Divided among 8 billion people that is roughly $1800/month or $60 a day. That’s the median income in Australia.²⁰ There are only 10 countries with a higher median income. That’s a decent living. In fact if we just wanted to lift those at the bottom, the 700 million making less than $2.15 a day, the cost is considerably cheaper²¹ – between $70 and $325 billion²² per year, according to a recent UN paper. That puts the possibility within the reach of not just the UN or the G7 but even individual people. Elon Musk, all by himself, could afford the bottom-range figure and remain a multi-billionaire (since 2020, his net worth has risen over $100 billion per year). And even the high-end figure represents just 5% of the United States’ annual budget.

This isn’t some far off dream. This is possible. We can all feel it. The racism, the wealth inequality, they feel wrong because some bit of us instinctually knows extending the Survival Machine is possible. But I’m a trained engineer and I’ve found that it’s sometimes easier to fix the machine than to labor at changing the hearts and minds. So let’s take a closer look at our machine?

We know overproduction is clogging the gears but how does it work? Or more importantly how do we want it to work? I like to picture a simple machine that is always by my side. If I need food, it conjures up some food. If I need shelter it builds a shelter. If I need healthcare it provides medicine. Whatever I might need simply appears. I believe this has always been the goal. The geese that flew fully cooked into your mouth in the Land of Cockaigne were a variation of this design. Today we’re shockingly close to this functionality. It's far too complicated to draw a single schematic, but we can get a better understanding by building up the components over time.

Version 1.0 - You do the work.
The most basic version of the machine. Still available to anyone who wants to head out into the forest naked. Find enough calories and you get to live. Simple direct effort as input and survival as output. Our ancestors traveled across the land hunting and gathering much the way a protozoa moves through water, knocking around until it finds enough sustenance. This machine provided incredible freedom. If we stumbled on a trove of berries or had a successful hunt we got to rest for a little while. Essentially we could do what we wanted as long as we could keep ourselves alive. But it was very hard to survive.

Version 2.0 - We do the work.
Very quickly we realized we could improve our chances of survival if we worked together. In forming families, tribes, and villages, humans learned to specialize. One human could hunt while another prepared food and a third built the shelter. The machine was no longer one human, it was a collection of humans working together. Your survival depended on my legs. My survival depended on your arms. We began to trust each other and survival got a little easier. A few of us, maybe the shaman and the chief, even got a little time to look at the world around them and ask questions – the beginning of Discovery Mode. This design eventually sustained around a million humans on the planet.²³

Version 3.0 - Animals do the work.
Someone with a little free time on their hands noticed the most docile animals could be bred together to create livestock and domestication was discovered. Suddenly we had access to ten times the power of our own muscles. A plot of land could support one hundred times more people²⁴. But now we had to take care of the animals, they were a part of our Survival Machine. After a long day in the field both the ox and the human needed a good night’s sleep. This forced greater specialization in our work. Each of us had a distinct role to play in the machine. If the farmer didn’t plant the fields, the carpenter who made his chairs or the king who provided him with protection could easily go hungry. The flywheel turned and we discovered the plow, irrigation, writing, and the calendar. This version of the machine supported humanity to a population of nearly 1 billion.²⁵

Version 4.0. Machines do the work.
Then along came the steam engine and factories were born. Now machines could smelt the steel, transport the goods, and manufacture the chairs. The output was staggering. One machine could do the work of thousands of humans. They didn’t need to eat or sleep. A utopia came into view, but these factories forced humans to fill in the gaps. The carpenter now worked in a factory fitting together finished chair parts, day after day. The blacksmith now guided molten steel into ingot molds, over and over and over. Humans had to fill in the roles that the giant machines couldn’t complete, becoming parts of the machine in the process. Life became narrower. The factory worker rose at dawn to keep the machines running. The farmer harvested the crop to meet the train’s scheduled arrival. We were the glue that held the machines together. But, unlike the machines, we needed to sleep and eat every day.

When everyone has a chair, chairs stop selling. The former carpenter doesn’t get paid. He sits in a warehouse stacked with chairs, but without money he can’t buy food. The thread that tied him to the Survival Machine has been cut. He goes hungry, and because he can’t buy food from the farmer or clothing from the tailor, their sales go down and then they can’t buy food or shelter from those who provide it to them. A great failing cascade moves through the market. One by one these highly specialized workers find their thread to the Survival Machine cut. And they can’t even revert to version 1.0 because the city is paved and all the plants and animals are gone.

Our incredible machine was full of weak links—humans. A human had to eat. A human had to sleep. The giant steel press could bend metal no human could dream of deforming, but it still needed a human to load the next sheet into the machine. These human components needed food and water whether the machine was running or not. If the factory owner noticed that no one was buying chairs he couldn’t just shut down the factory and wait until there was a new need. The human components would starve. So we needed to keep the machine going at all costs.

Version 4.5 (Patch). Machines + consumption does the work.
Some clever economists realized that rather than fine tuning supply, a challenging problem, we could manufacture demand. If everything grew always then no one would lose their job or go hungry. We studied the mind and figured out how to spur purchases at every turn. Consumption went up, the machine stabilized, and the 20th century happened.

This is where we find ourselves today. Version 4.5 is running full steam but the crater on the horizon is coming into view. Our machine is amazing but its days are numbered. So how do we fix this machine? The same way you fix any machine – swap out the failing parts – the humans.

Version 5.0. AI does the work.
If we swap out the weak human components then the machine could run all night and day without stopping, or any piece of it could be shut down until demand picked back up. Without humans gumming up the works the machine could adjust to our needs rather than dictate our needs.

Imagine an automated chair factory run by AI. It makes chairs extraordinarily quickly and therefore extraordinarily cheaply. But now, when demand dries up, everyone has a chair, it simply pauses, or switches from making chairs in the morning to making tables in the afternoon. Its robotics are general and therefore as flexible as any craftsman three hundred years ago. Our new Survival Machine can freely adjust to our needs rather than manufacturing our wants. Finally we can step outside the machine and have it run alongside us as we’ve always dreamed. We can have the flexibility of version 1.0 with the impressive output of version 4.0. It sounds much like the perfect version we began with.

Soon our Survival Machine could drift into the background, something we access with the touch of a button or the flip of a switch like water or electricity. In their essay “Solve Everything,²⁶” Dr. Alexander D. Wissner-Gross and Dr. Peter H. Diamandis predict what they call Action Networks, fully automated physical facilities for science and production, by the year 2030. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, predicts the eradication of most cancers and diseases in the next ten years.²⁷ Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, claims that we will reach what he calls Moore's Law for Everything²⁸, where all productivity and benefit doubles every two years. If even half of this is true, we are on the threshold of completing a floor for everyone to stand on. The utopias our ancestors dreamed of and struggled toward could finally be manifested.

But we must be clear-eyed about this moment. We’re at a fork in the road. We can choose to use the incredible technology of artificial intelligence to complete the Survival Machine, or we can use it to supercharge our current Desire Machine. AI’s masterful pattern recognition could be used to recognize our patterns before we do, nudging and coaxing and triggering even more consumption. If we turn over our lives to AI we'll stop noticing – we'll stop discovering – and the current frame of life that we live in will persist forever. Our 4.5 version of the Survival Machine could easily swallow us whole. Our desires will be led by the machine’s needs and not our own.

We've done this before. Thought in the Dark Ages was vastly dictated by the Catholic Church. The Rules or St. Benedict told us when to wake and where to look. The bells of the monastery structured our days. And for hundreds of years very little changed, very little was discovered. Gravity, electricity, and magnetism were all right there in front of us but no one took the time to notice and the flywheel nearly stopped.

The true tragedy is that we've already begun to see ourselves as parts in this machine and not as humans with full minds and whole lives. If, instead, we focus our AI efforts on completing the Survival Machine, once and for all, we can re-engage the discovery flywheel. Each improvement will put more and more minds into Discovery Mode. Each improvement will free us to live life as we please.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes saw this coming a hundred years ago. “[T]he economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race," he said. "Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well."²⁹

Our ancestors spent their lives building and maintaining this machine but it's time for a redesign. It's time to finally escape the machine and live the lives we've all dreamed of. What would you do if you could pursue living wisely and agreeably and well rather than struggling to earn your survival every day?

But with a smoothly running survival machine, we're left with a new problem. What do we do with all this free time?

Chapter 08Step 3 – Protect Our Time

It’s Monday morning at the start of a fresh work week. We’ll follow two average people—Abigail and Bill—as they begin their day. Abigail arrives at the office at 9 am and gets straight to work. She sits down in front of her computer, opens her browser, and begins tackling the day’s emails. Bill starts with the same high hopes. He opens his laptop bright and early, but he manages to get lost on his way to his inbox. He winds up on YouTube, watching video after video, ad after ad. This is how the day unfolds, Abigail working away, Bill vegging out.

The question is: Which of the two is making the better use of their time? The more valuable use? Who is contributing more to the economy?

The answer—shockingly—is that it’s a wash. Under the Desire Machine, both Abigail and Bill are contributing about the same amount of economic value. If we put Abigail’s wage at the US national average, she’s making $36.24 per hour, which translates to $0.60/min. That also happens to be the going rate for video ads targeted at premium audiences in the US.³⁰

Today, advertisers are willing to pay about as much for a minute of your attention as employers are for your effort. Granted ad numbers on the internet can vary widely—depending heavily on the viewer’s metadata and the underlying content. But the trend is unmistakable: Back in 2010, rates for premium video ads reached roughly the equivalent of the federal minimum wage.³¹ But now, they are 5 times higher, while the minimum wage has barely moved at all.

This is how we value your mind’s minutes today, and it’s coming for all of us. Each year the value of an average hour of work becomes a little less, while the value of attention becomes a little more. This year we passed the $75k threshold; that is, Bill has to make more than $75k a year for his efforts to be worth more than his ability to be influenced. Soon it will be $100k and then $200k.

If you, like many of us, feel besieged from all sides for your time, and yet none of it feels particularly well spent, this is why. There’s good money to be made bidding for a few minutes of your attention. Every time we free up a few minutes, someone simply buys them. That’s why the Desire Machine seeks to nudge and interrupt us from the moment we wake until the moment we fall asleep. It may sound like a small thing—a split-second of distraction, a half-hour of scrolling. But it adds up fast. We spend more than 6.5 hours a day in front of a screen³², and Gloria Marks, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine reports that once interrupted it takes an average of 25 minutes for a human mind to re-find its focus.³³ Unfortunately our phones now interrupt us every 5 minutes.³⁴ By that math, we’ll find our focus right around the time that Sisyphus is finished with his boulder.

So what is the value of our time? Compare Abigail and Bill to a third figure. Call him Charles.

By his own admission, Charles is hardly a role model. He’s a poor student, he drinks too much, and he’s a master at wasting time. Charles is the type to have the audacity to ask his father to send him on a sailing trip around the world, with no real plan. After his father flatly refuses—“It would be a useless undertaking”—he’s also the type to find another way to make it happen, and then to disappear for five whole years. He visits South America, South Africa, Australia, Tahiti, and the Galapagos Islands. Yes, this is that Charles. He presents himself as a “naturalist” and spends his time observing the foliage, the birds, the insects, the fossils. He notes all their details, completing a 770-page diary, writing 1,750 pages of notes, and cataloging 5,436 specimens, all without a deeper purpose.

What’s the value of Charles Darwin’s time?

Charles’s “useless undertaking” would become the foundation of On the Origin of Species and the theory of evolution by natural selection—arguably the most transformative scientific insight in human history. It yielded tangible improvements in almost every field of knowledge, from agriculture to education, and it made possible entire industries and branches of science, including biotech and genomics. If you were to put a monetary value on Charles’s discovery, tracing its impact from 1859 to the present, it wouldn't be unreasonable to estimate it around 100 trillion dollars. That effectively puts each minute of Charles’ time at a value of more than two million dollars.

Darwin is an extreme example, but this basic pattern holds for many a discovery: The Wright Brothers crashed planes on the beach for 4 years before getting off the ground. Marie Curie took over 5 years to develop her curiosity into the full discovery of radiation. The American inventor Clarence Birdseye took even longer—7 years—to turn a particularly bad -40 °C day of fishing into the invention of flash frozen food. Each of these efforts ended up being worth billions, but each also took at least 10,000 hours of uncertain time and attention. That’s a rough benchmark for what it takes to turn a unique observation into an idea that is useful to others – a discovery. The vast majority of those hours appear unpromising or aimless. But this is where discovery hides, in the freedom of our time.

Today, in our professional lives, every moment has become one that can be judged by its productivity. We answer the emails. Respond to the text messages. Keep up with the social feed. Race to match the grinders who’ll be filling the gaps if you don’t. And yet, despite all the magical metrics and data of our era, the workplace has not yet found any good way to measure what all this hyperactivity amounts to.

Cal Newport makes this point in his book Slow Productivity. The cultural norm of hard work has served us for generations, but it is failing us now. With no good metrics for measuring productivity, busyness takes its place. To be busy is a bulwark against judgment. We want people to know that we’re working hard—more emails, more meetings—because if we’re not then how are we contributing?

It becomes a game of chicken. No one wants to appear lazy, so workers are uncomfortable wrapping up early or taking days off. The same fear, in a broader sense, carries over to considerations like remote work or a 4-day work week (let alone anything approaching the 15-hour work week that Keynes imagined). We all reflexively respond like busy-bodies: What will they use their time for? What if they get lazy and stop working? Won’t they be a drain rather than a contribution? And so we all find reasons not to wander off and explore a new idea. Scared it might look like we were doing nothing at all.

So how do we protect slow time for the mind? How do we give ourselves a chance at the $2 million minutes instead of $.60 minutes? We’re all capable of exploring the world in Discovery Mode. Who among us couldn’t notice the variation of finch beaks on the Galapagos if given the time. What do we build?

We actually already built it—900 years ago. It’s called the University and it’s the perfect technology to protect slow-time and support a mind in Discovery Mode.

We’ve all stepped onto a college campus at some point in our lives. The sounds of the cars drift away. You start to notice the things, birds, trees, other people. Your mind begins to calm and focus. The urgency of daily life recedes. That’s by design. If we remove the excessive credentialing and class system bulwark that higher education has become today, we see the university for what it is: a focus machine, the perfect place to protect our slow time.

The first university was founded in Bologna, Italy in 1088, not, as one might expect, by royal or religious decree but by students forming a guild to protect their ability to study³⁵. When students flocked to Bologna to study Roman law the town took advantage, raising rents and forcing students to pay their fellow countrymen’s debts. Just feeding and housing oneself became nearly impossible until the students banded together to form a guild. The latin word universitas literally means guild. They protected themselves from the vindictive town folk and even hired their professors. That’s right, the first university was a group of students banding together to shield themselves from the predatory instincts of the era’s Survival Machine and then carving out slow time for the mind.

Every inch of the university is designed to protect the mind. The study carrel puts three walls around you for maximum focus. The quiet of the reading room reduces distractions. The campus itself is usually walled or separated from its surroundings. Over the past 900 years we’ve built these incredible institutions for protecting the mind. And on the whole, they really work.

In 1991 Edwin Mansfield published findings that showed a return rate of 28% on academic research.³⁶ This was independently confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office. The average time to return was, you guessed it, about 7 years, just like Darwin or the Wright Brothers. Wall Street would leap at a return of 28%. If you’d invested in the S\&P 500 over the past 10 years, your rate of return would be around 12.5%. Mansfield found that investing in academic research yields more than twice our precious stock market. In 2020 economist Benjamin Jones and former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, broadened the concept. He found that every $1 invested in R\&D created a $5 return economy wide³⁷. Slow-time is one of our best investments. In fact the world-famous MacDowell artists residency has no structure at all save meal time and has produced 103 Pulitzer prizes.³⁸

So why haven’t we just invested everything into universities? Alas, they’re really expensive. We’ve always needed the bulk of humanity to mind the Survival Machine. Traditionally only the “best minds,” or more commonly to the wealthiest, have had access to the top-flight universities and their slow-time protection. Why was Darwin able to wander the world in a boat for five years after attending the University of Cambridge with unimpressive results? His father was rich and eventually caved and paid for the trip. He owned buildings, a stake in a canal, and loaned money to Shropshire’s gentry. And if that wasn’t enough, Darwin’s mother was heir to the Wedgwood pottery fortune. Darwin lived with the luxury of time. He didn’t wake up each morning worried about his survival, he could park his mind in Discovery Mode and explore the world.

Today our universities have become a class system and a credentialing machine. But it doesn’t have to function this way. As a matter of fact we don’t need universities at all. We only need the core functionality that gives our minds the space to notice something new, commit to it, and spend the slow time it takes to understand. As the cost of survival drops precipitously we will be able to extend the protections of slow-time to everyone. We don’t need to build millions of universities. We need to atomize the university just as we did the computer.

In the 1960s an IBM System/360 Model 75 cost $5 million dollars and required a dedicated room with heavy air-conditioning. The fully loaded version had 1MB of RAM. Today a modern iPhone is 350,000 times faster, houses 8,000 times more memory, costs 5,000 times less, and weighs only 6.6 ounces compared to several tons. Computing was atomized because compute-per-dollar collapsed. Transistors became less and less expensive to produce when we discovered how to print them and now we all have a computer in our pocket that is 350,000 times more powerful than the best money could buy just 50 years ago.

The next challenge will be to atomize the university in a similar fashion. If AI runs the Survival Machine, freed-time-per-dollar will collapse and the most profitable use of time will be discovery. We’ve done this with energy. We’ve done this with medicine. We’ve done this with clean drinking water. We’ve even done this reading and writing. It used to take 12 years of grueling training to become a respected scribe³⁹. Today our six-year-olds can read and write. In the future we could all be professors of whatever subject we’d spent the time to explore.

When you first hear it, it sounds preposterous - a university in every pocket - but this is how progress has always worked. The bottom line is this: if just one 1 in 100,000 minds makes a discovery, the investment pays off. And I think we’ve got a lot more discoveries in us than that.

Still, the value of discovery often becomes obvious only in hindsight. No one would argue that the Wright Brothers discovery of powered flight wasn’t beneficial to everyone. But when two brothers from Ohio spent four years crashing airplanes on the beach at Kitty Hawk the locals pretty much wrote them off. Even the US government so doubted them that they never responded to letters announcing the accomplishment. That’s why France has an aviation industry today: the Wright Brothers had to go abroad to find support for their new discovery.

A Discovery Society, then, can’t be possible without a new relationship with our time. We need to accept that working toward discovery comes with dead ends, lucky breaks, and chance encounters. It is not as straightforward as scrolling through ad-laden apps or shooting off an extra handful of emails. It requires time that does not obviously contribute to either production or consumption; and it requires us to have the trust and autonomy to use our time well. I suspect that many of us would be overjoyed to rediscover our creativity and our childhood love of learning—and to apply it anew.

In a Discovery Society, that’s exactly the plan. A citizen’s contribution will be their discovery. In return we’ll all receive a fully-fledged Survival Machine and the trust required to develop our ideas. That’s the beginning of a new social deal. As we move away from the Desire Machine, we’ll want government and civil institutions to invest in discovery time and protect it. We’ll want economic policies that let individuals benefit from their discoveries while also enabling society to make good on its investment.

This is a rare moment when the most profitable thing and the most humane thing are one in the same. Discovery is our highest return activity and the thing the mind most wants to do. Darwin’s parents bought his slow-time for him. It's time to buy an “Infrastructure for the Mind” for everyone else.

But there’s still one more step to build to complete our Discovery Society. One mind that is respected, supported, and given the time to explore can do incredible things but it only knows what it knows. It’s the world’s best funded hermit. There’s a ceiling to what one mind can reach. If we truly want to get the most out of every mind we need to connect them. Every mind needs access to every other mind and all that it knows. The last step in building a Discovery Society is to open the frontier.

Chapter 09Step 4 - Open the Frontier

In 1962 the famed chemist, polymath, and tutor to three Nobel Prize winners, Michael Polanyi envisioned what he called a Republic of Science⁴⁰. He was reacting to the Soviet Union's attempts to centralize scientific planning. He believed that science could not be forced or controlled. It needed to be fueled by curiosity. What he outlined essentially amounted to a marketplace for knowledge. If we widen the scope of topic we could call it a Republic of Discovery.

The fundamental metaphor is the puzzle. Imagine a giant puzzle and a large group tasked with solving it as quickly as possible. There are a number of ways the group could approach this problem. You could divide up the pieces, giving each helper an equal portion. But your pieces might be from all over the puzzle. You could give every helper a full puzzle and then integrate their solutions back together. But this would be no better than working alone. The most obvious approach is also the best. Do it together. Everyone sees all the pieces and sees what everyone else is doing. When one member of the group fits a piece into the puzzle, all the members of the group see the progress and adjust their work accordingly.

Polanyi believed that “Under this system, each helper will act on his own initiative, by responding to the latest achievements of the others, and the completion of their joint task will be greatly accelerated. We have here in a nutshell the way in which a series of independent initiatives are organized to a joint achievement by mutually adjusting themselves at every successive stage to the situation created by all the others who are acting likewise.”⁴¹ This is the best description I’ve found of what the mind needs to explore the frontier of human knowledge.

In short each member has access to state-of-the-art information (the pieces that have been fitted together), access to instruments to complete the work (the remaining pieces as well as their hands and eyes), and access to the community of minds exploring the frontier (the group working around the table). Knowledge, instruments, and community. To extend the frontier, all three layers are necessary. This confluence repeats over and over again through history in the greatest pockets of discovery.

All three layers converged in the workshops of Florence in the 15th Century⁴². Knowledge was transmitted by hand up and down the street – bronze casting, anatomy, and linear perspective were all at the bleeding edge of the field. The chisels, the casting pits, the pigments, the lifting systems were cutting edge instruments of the day. And the community, the community was wildly impressive. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, and many others were all trained in the same neighborhood next to the Arno river. The simple convergence of these three layers built the Italian Renaissance.

In London it built the Scientific Revolution. On November 28th, 1660, Robert Boyle and eleven others founded the Royal Society⁴³. Each week they met at Gresham College (Community layer) to witness demonstrations and experiments with the day's cutting edge equipment, air pumps, microscopes, barometers (Instruments layer). Their knowledge layer was run by Henry Oldenburg who single-handedly managed the frontier by corresponding with natural philosophers across Britain, Europe, and the Americas, and then printing them monthly in the world’s first journal devoted to science. Anyone with a shilling to spare could join the vanguard of science.⁴⁴ This little community of fellows eventually included the likes of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Christopher Wren. In its more than three hundred years of operation it counts 280 Nobel Laureates as members.

This is the pattern that repeats over and over. Three layers, knowledge, instruments, and community converging to create access to the frontier. Bell Labs, the birthplace of the transistor, the solar cell, the UNIX operating system, and the laser, had a simple take on state of the art knowledge, just walk down the hall and ask the person who defined it. The strategy was to employ the top mind in each field so that they could learn from each other and interact. Its director, Mervin Kelly, believed his minds were too valuable to waste on second rate equipment as always bought the state of the art instruments. The building itself was designed to “...to encourage free interchange and close contact among [the researchers].“⁴⁵ The halls were so long that on your way to lunch you were young to be pulled into someone else’s work.

The same three layers converged at Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project in the 1940’s, at the Edinburgh Enlightenment in the 18th Century, at Xerox PARC in the 1970’s. Each worked on the frontier, equipped minds with knowledge, instruments, and community, and brought incredible discoveries into the world.

This convergence isn’t just for scientists, it works for any field where minds build on each other. Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, brought together painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, and performers and produced a raft of incredibly influential artists from musician John Cage to painters Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, and Cy Twombly, to architect Buckminster Fuller. In literature the same confluence occurred in The Bloomsbury Group which met in London on Thursdays in the 1920’s and 30’s. They owned their own printing press and could print without asking anyone’s permission. Their ranks included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and even famed economist John Maynard Keynes, whose economic predictions were likely first read to the little group at 46 Gordon Square.

Today there’s a molecular biology lab in Cambridge lovingly known as “The Nobel Factory.” One of its founding members, Nobel Prize winner Max Perutz wrote, “⁠Experience had taught me that laboratories often fail because their scientists never talk to each other. To stimulate the exchange of ideas, we built a canteen where people can chat at morning coffee, lunch and tea. It was managed for over twenty years by my wife, Gisela, who saw to it that the food was good and that it was a place where people would make friends. Scientific instruments were to be shared, rather than being jealously guarded as people’s private property; this saved money and also forced people to talk to each other.”⁴⁶ All three layers converging at once. Since it opened in 1962, 16 members of the lab have won Nobel Prizes and what makes it unique is that nearly every one of them won the prize for work done at the lab. It’s not just a collection of awarded people. It’s the place that supported the work.

The pattern is simple. The pattern is overwhelming. Discoveries don’t happen in isolation. They happen at the frontier. A mind needs to bounce off of other minds. If we want a mind to discover it needs access to the frontier.

So I propose we open the frontier to everyone. Give every mind access to state of the art knowledge. Give every mind access to the instruments to do the work. Give every mind a community to explore the frontier with. If each puzzle piece is a discovery then everyone around the table needs access or we’re just slowing down the process. It’s not a building. It’s not a region. It’s not a special time period. It's simply an infrastructure for the mind.

You may be thinking, sure this can happen in a lab full of geniuses but to scale it will be impossible. Japan tells us otherwise.

On July 8, 1853 Commodore Perry forced his steamships into Tokyo Bay triggering a panic among the shogunate class. In 200 years of isolation Japan had fallen woefully behind the industrialized world. They still mostly fought with swords and bows. The country needed to modernize immediately or it would be carved up just as China had been during the opium wars. But Japan was essentially a feudal society ruled by a samurai warrior class: Peasants were peasants like their parents before them. Samurai were samurai. Artisans were artisans. There was no convergence. Pulling minds to the frontier was a tall task.

With no access to the knowledge frontier Japan needed to send their people West to learn. Fukuzawa Yukichi was among the first to study the West. When he returned he wrote An Encouragement of Learning to explain the West to ordinary readers. It sold millions of copies and he was put in charge of reforming education. Then the Iwakura Mission sent nearly 100 officials on a tour of the West to observe their political, military, economic, and education institutions.

Japan shipped in the cutting edge instruments it needed to catch up. The railway tracks and its cars were imported from England. Silk Mills were brought in from France. A Scottish designer was hired to build lighthouses in every port.

And finally they connected minds as best they could. The Gakusei education code, written in part by Yukichi, set out to put a school in every village. He believed that “Even a common man who is educated may surpass the samurai who is not.”

The results were stunning, and nearly immediate. Within 30 years, the percentage of children attending school soared from 25%⁴⁷ to 95%. Literacy rates skyrocketed to over 90%. Women could now write, teach, and participate in public life. Japan’s industrial output surged eightfold by the early 1900’s. But the most striking results were the discoveries.

Takamine Jōkichi, the son of a physician and a family of sake brewers, went to college to become a chemist. He was one of the first to graduate from the newly founded University of Tokyo and discovered a technique to isolate adrenaline, which would forever change emergency medicine. He was soon joined by Nagai Nagayoshi, who discovered ephedrine, a key component of decongestants and asthma medicine. If one wanted to put a value on the discovery of adrenaline alone, it is likely worth over $400 billion. Simply by granting access to knowledge, access to instruments, and connecting minds, Japan transformed in a generation, from an isolated feudal nation into a global player capable of advancing the world’s scientific knowledge.

Today we stand on the threshold of an entirely new restoration, a global restoration. Look at your phone. It's probably been sitting there in your pocket this whole time. Take it out. You touch it hundreds of times a day. I've already chastised it for stealing your attention. But this phone can also converge all three layers at any moment for anyone. You could read every paper in molecular biology. You could study the most recent images from our most powerful telescope. You could call the world's foremost expert on sperm whales. It's all right there on your phone.

Rather than using this technology to distract us towards our next purchase, we can use it to put the frontier in everyone's pocket. The work is being done on the sidelines right now but if we acknowledge the potential value of a mind on the frontier, it can join the mainstream.

Data is our new microscope. It is the lens that lets us see beyond our own circumstance. When Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek created a single lens that could magnify the world 200x he saw bacteria for the first time. He moved the frontier. Germ theory was born. Cities instituted public sanitation. The very foundations of medicine were rebuilt.

Data lets us see things we’ve never seen before. The more data each of us has access to, the more of the frontier we can explore. Today most of the open data initiatives are non-profits or public goods, but if we have respect, survival and time covered, profit is measured in discoveries and not survival. In this case data becomes the fuel for every mind.

Organizations like Wikipedia and SciHub and the Internet Archive have been fighting this battle for a while, sometimes illegally. To form a vibrant Discovery Society open data needs to be central to every project. Scientific papers shouldn’t be paywalled. We need to follow the example of ArXiv, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar. In a Discovery Society we are all discoverers, not just the scientists, and we need to build the tools that work for everyone, not just for an elite few. Companies like DeSci Labs⁴⁸ are leading the way in making scientific progress available and transparent to everyone.

At Princeton University Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielson built a project they call Quantum Country⁴⁹. It’s an interface that uses our knowledge of how the mind learns to bring anyone to the frontier of quantum computing and mechanics in just a few hours. Imagine if we use what the Desire Machine has learned about the mind to teach and bring new minds to the frontier. Imagine a site where anyone could ask questions of the world and receive back a mountain of data. What do you pay for your electrical bill? How many times have you been in love? We're all full of questions and these questions are what lead to discoveries. Without access to the data, we don’t have access to the frontier.

If you want to look at the stars, you need a telescope. If you want to study bacteria, you need a microscope. Instruments allow us to extend our sensors and do the work of exploration.

For most of human history instruments have been relatively cheap. You just needed a bit of human knowledge and the right resources to turn a piece of glass into a lens, or some wood and cloth into an airplane. But today instruments have gotten extremely expensive. A state-of-the-art fMRI machine can cost more than $5 million. The James Webb telescope cost $10 billion. This led to instruments being locked in fancy labs or government institutions and access being limited. But all of this is about to change. Access to the world's cutting-edge instruments will soon be delivered to your pocket.

Companies like Future House⁵⁰ and Edison Scientific⁵¹ are building AI scientists who can move, “From hypothesis to registration, in days, not months.” Today they are, “Pairing exceptional scientists with advanced AI agents,” but when they open these tools to everyone, each of our questions become advanced science. Companies like Lila⁵² and Periodic Labs⁵³ are building autonomous science labs, just like the ones predicted in Peter Diamandis’s “Solve Everything” essay. Jeff Bezos recently co-founded Prometheus Industries, Inc.⁵⁴ to build an “Artificial General Engineer.” How many times have you dismissed an idea because you had no idea how to make it? Imagine having an engineer in your pocket. All the math and materials science solved for you. You could move from dream to reality in days, not months or years.

From space, Planet⁵⁵’s Dove constellation of satellites now takes a picture of the entire earth every single day. Soon that will be every hour then every minute and every second. We'll have a full real-time functioning model of the planet. If paired with companies like 4DV.ai⁵⁶ or Gracia AI⁵⁷ that model becomes three dimensional. A 3D record of the entire planet at your fingertips. Imagine the questions you could ask.

But without access to a community on the frontier, you're stuck with your own thoughts. We all see the world differently.Even when working on a puzzle, others will notice something you wouldn't have on your own. We each have slightly different sensors and a slightly different experience through which to interpret their meaning. Discoveries are built by communities.

Putting these communities in your pocket will never replace an in-person community but it certainly can inspire and spur discovery forward. Organizations like the Polymath Project⁵⁸ began sewing together these communities years ago. In 2009 Fields Medalist, Timothy Gowers posted an unsolved math problem online and suggested the mathematicians of the world work together to solve it. In only seven weeks they did. Zooniverse⁵⁹ employs millions of volunteers to classify everything from galaxies to animals and push forward real science. eBird⁶⁰ has collected over 2 billion bird observations from over a million ordinary birders over 253 countries. iNaturalist⁶¹ has collected 242 million observations of over half a million species. Harvard Business School estimates that the open source software community has created $8.8 trillion⁶² in value in the last 40 years. We've begun to learn how to work as a team across spaces in large communities. This is just the tip of the iceberg. So far it's just a collection of niche individuals working within expertise.

Imagine if any time you took an interest in something, you could instantly be connected to a community on the frontier of that subject. Imagine a Bell Labs in every neighborhood across the country and across the world. We have bars, we have gyms. Why not a place for the mind, a place for discovery? There could be daily meetings where you hash out your latest ideas with others working on their own ideas. Today we go to the shopping mall to bond and share experiences. Tomorrow we could go to the Discovery workshop down the street. This is how it works in the canteen at the MRC. This is how it worked in the Bloomsbury Group’s Thursday salons and the Black Mountain School happenings.

The infrastructure we're building today can put the frontier in every pocket, in every town, in every country on the planet but, as we know, it can also steal our attention and time. Zooniverse and TikTok are built on the same infrastructure - the same routers and servers and phones - but one steals our attention and the other places us on the frontier. The decisions we make with AI will determine the next chapter for humanity. We can build customer assistants that help you shop for your next purchase or we can build products and services that put every human mind on the frontier. The Desire Machine needs minds dumb enough to be reliably steered toward another purchase. A Discovery Society needs minds equipped to reach for what they’re most curious about. We’ve already built the infrastructure to equip minds; we just need to point it in the right direction.

If we can all see the puzzle pieces we can all make discoveries. Two hundred years ago only 10% of the world was literate and today it's well over 90%. There's no reason for only 1% of the world to sit in an ivory tower with exclusive access to frontier information and instruments. We looked at birds for thousands and thousands of years, dreaming of flying and today we take it for granted. Big goals don't have to be saved for tomorrow. They can happen today

If you're someone who builds tools, build tools that converge these three layers. If you're someone who creates communities, create communities that converge these three layers. If you're someone who holds knowledge, share the knowledge freely.

We opened this exploration with a question about where the future had gone. I’ll give you this as the short answer. The future has not gone far after all. It simply lies in the minds of those around us.

Conclusion

And so that’s the journey of one question. We’ve learned about our ancestors' common struggle to build the Survival Machine and their common dream that its completion would lead to utopia. We’ve seen the excitement generated by the prospect of machines taking over the work but we’ve also seen the fear and panic caused by the countless crashes of the Industrial Revolution. We saw the moment we took our wrong and built the Desire Machine. And now we’ve nearly grown used to it, fighting tooth and nail for ownership of our own time. Unfortunately the cliff on the horizon is coming into view. Our planet’s resources are limited and every minute we distract our minds makes it that much harder to make a new discovery that might relieve our situation.

But the answer is not all that complicated. We simply need to recognize that the source of everything we’ve built is not resources we’ve used or the capital we’ve accumulated. It’s the minds we’ve managed to unlock with these resources and capital. Historically we’ve always underestimated the minds around us and over and over they’ve stepped up to the challenge. The way forward is to revalue a mind in Discovery Mode and provide it the time and resources it needs to explore the frontier. The paradigm shift may sound fantastical or naive but, as a species, we’ve already done far more incredible things than a simple reorganization of values. Each time our Survival Machine has changed it’s components society has had to change with it. Today we have the opportunity to begin moving into the next chapter.

I want to leave you with two things.

One, the key thing to remember is the difference in value of a mind in Survival Mode and a mind in Discovery Mode. Today the Desire Machine values our minds at about $.60 per minute with all the lattes and new shoes we can buy. The Jones-Summers⁶³ paper says a Discovery Minute returns about 5x the input. Which would value a Discovery Minute at about $3 and that’s with the inevitable failures built in. A Darwin minute was about $2 million but that’s simply Darwin’s time, not a comparable number. If we say Darwin is one in a million, so 99.9999% will fail, a Darwin minute is still worth about $167. That’s 280x our current value. Just the raw numbers are impressive but we also must remember that discovery creates what economists call a non-rival good. Unlike a barrel of oil or a cord of wood (a rival good) a discovery can be used over and over. Galileo’s pendulum discovery is still distributing dividends every time your phone pings GPS.⁶⁴

With this math we have a new way of thinking how to finance the end of extreme poverty for 533 million minds. We don’t have to rely on the generosity of Elon Musk or some other billionaire. If we’re looking for about $300 million each year, we can simply apply minds in Discovery Mode to the problem. At today’s $.60 value we could apply 4.4 million minds in full time discovery mode and generate the funds. If we use Jones-Summers minutes we only need around 900,000 minds. That’s half the people who work for McDonalds worldwide. And if we use Darwin minutes that number shrinks to 16,000.⁶⁵ These numbers won't win a Nobel Prize but they start to point to something. They start to open a door for us to see the world around us differently.Value is created by minds in Discovery Mode. It always has been. If we look at the world through this lens a great future will be unlocked and a new society can be built.

The second key is where to start. Even if this vision might feel great, often the totality of a new paradigm can be overwhelming. Society itself is a difficult thing to hold in one's mind. But as the great sociologist Georg Simmel once wrote, “Society merely is the name for a number of individuals, connected by interaction.” ⁶⁶ Nearly all of the billions of interactions we have on a daily basis are not governed by laws or customs or trade agreements. There's a single sentence that basically holds together modern society: "Treat others as you want them to treat you." The golden rule. Nearly every religion and culture on earth promotes this kind of reciprocity. ⁶⁷ Society is just me and you, you and your neighbor, and your neighbor and the guy across town. How we hold our expectations, how we act and behave every day, that builds a “society,” not the other way around. And so to guide us in our next chapter, I propose that we add to this most brilliant phase. Not because I am, by any means, qualified to do so but because I believe we need a beacon, something we can aim for.

"Treat others as you would have them treat you, and trust their minds with your future as they trust you with theirs.”

We are on the brink of something unquestionably incredible. The shape it takes is up to us. I'm not interested in living in a world where my sole purpose is to make another purchase. I'm not interested in living in a world where AI tells me the best way forward. I wanted to see the discoveries in your mind and the discoveries of the woman across the street and the man across town and the young boy on the other side of the world.

If that interests you, let's start building.