Once the Cosmos Become Commonplace

Castles in the Sky #59

You never know where a dream will come from or take you. 

One recent February morning, my wife played with our two-year-old daughter and two small dogs while I scrambled some eggs. It was a picturesque scene that would be the envy of many. But I was glued to my phone, doomscrolling Twitter bemoaning the end of art, meaning, and shared reality. 

OpenAI had released a new feature called Sora that could create videos from a simple prompt. Neck craned, I held the phone inches from my face as I watched videos of paper airplanes flying through the jungle or fake astronauts on a salt moon while I stirred eggs. When the food was done, I just barely wrenched my attention away long enough to decide to do a small workout in our garage so I could claw some sanity back for the rest of my day. 

Lifting weights gave me the chemical relief of whatever hormone it is that lifting heavy things releases. It dawned on me that most fear is vestigial. Frank Herbert got it right in Dune when he wrote that “fear is the mind-killer.” It’s an ancient biological signal for the unfamiliar. It’s certainly something to heed but so much is so unfamiliar now that it is just one more kind of data. In reality, I don’t agree with the amen chorus on Twitter that AI is the end of meaning, and I certainly don’t think it’s going to “come alive” and kill us all. 

Rarely does fear match what we need it for. Most fear today is tantamount to anxiety: sludge built up around us, holding us down and casting shadows on the wall, building inconveniences into existential threats. Video is so visceral, so that morning was a perfect storm. Upon closer examination after my workout I was impressed, but no longer overwhelmed by the videos. 

I use AI a lot. I use ChatGPT for hours a day for my work and my hobbies. I am not an expert but I am public enough about my use that I’ve been quoted once in a “man on the street” article by the New York Times. I am bullish on technology, and specifically, I am bullish on humanity’s ability to use technology. I am tremendously hopeful about our abilities to solve our problems. I am hungry for the future. But something about the immediacy and clarity of the videos struck me differently. What else could AI do? What else could it recreate? What other problems might it help us solve? If it could whip up videos that quickly, where else could it scale up and reproduce our work? 

I walked outside with, Bingo, one of the aforementioned small dogs, and began to play fetch in the early morning sunlight. I started to think of my beginning of the year post, Dreams Over Goals in 2024. The main idea of that post was that “goal-setting” had become a pathological optimizing behavior, so I was worried more about routine prioritization and getting things done so that I could make room for a bigger type of dream I had forgotten how to have. The sentence I think best captured the spirit of the whole post was:  

I no longer set goals so that now I can make space for dreams more authentic, ambitious, and unbelievable than I can even conceive of now.

Bingo is a muscly Dachsund mutt with curly, golden hair that gets muddy in the Houston dew when we play fetch. As he sprinted to the edge of our yard for the seventh or eighth trip, time slowed down, and as I watched him plant each paw into the Earth and grass flew up, the events of the mornings crystallized into a single vision. He watched the bone turn over in the air and my awareness collapsed: 

I was suddenly millions of miles away standing with my wife and adult children on a long metal observation deck. It was new but familiar, like in a dream. We wore casual clothing and were happy to be there, impressed but not surprised or afraid. I was out of body, looking at us from behind, as we looked out at a window multiple stories tall. The sky out of the window was starry and a third was occupied by a deep reddish glow. And the phrase “a cruise to Jupiter” settled into my awareness.

My eyes widened, my breath got faster, and my chest tightened. The vision came and went. All of this happened before Bingo got back to me with the bone. 

It was wild, fantastical, ambitious, ridiculous–probably impossible, exactly the kind of thing I was hoping would happen when I said I was looking for dreams more authentic, ambitious, and unbelievable than I can even conceive of now. 

I think there are a lot of reasons to view technology and AI–and the large corporations and governments that are pushing them–with rigorous skepticism. But also, we might possibly be the most lucky cohort of people who have ever been born. If AI is capable of a fraction of the things its detractors say it can do, then we are about to witness an unlocking of human potential unlike we have ever seen in human history. 

For the thing about AI is this–it always needs a prompt. We call them agents, but AI does not have agency. It does not get inspired. It does not have visions. It is a tool. The only limits to what we can achieve with technology are our imagination, our capacity to work together, and our ability to find meaning. 

As Martin Luther King said, “our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.” What is needed more than ever is hope and a reminder that the human imagination is infinite. My wife and future adult children vacationing with me to space is not a dream for me in the way that “eat sushi in Tokyo” is, like a box to be checked on a bucket list. 

Early in our dating, I made a joke to my wife about a bet some friends and I had that Elon Musk would one day put people on Mars. My wife got very serious and said, “if this relationship is going to go anywhere, you have to know that we’re not moving to space, we’re Earth people.” Somehow, she knew I was seriously thinking about moving to space, and I knew she was serious about not leaving Earth. 

Technology has so captured our attention that we have been overwhelmed with the present. And while we weren’t paying attention, fear moved in and claimed squatter’s rights on our future. The idea that space tourism becomes so commonplace that my wife and adult children would indulge me in a trip in the next quarter century is a dream worth pursuing. 

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Note from Charlie: I have been quiet the last few months here because I’ve been working on some big things. You may have noticed that the numbers went up on the issues. The homepage has also changed a bit. If you read on a desktop, please click through to check out the new homepage layout and organization and let me know what you think.