Taking my best guess

Being alive is a strange situation. We find ourselves inside a reality we only partly understand, with some time to explore it and some ability to change it. Then we have to decide what to do.

That decision is underneath most of what interests me. Which questions deserve our attention? What should we build? What makes one use of our time more meaningful than another?

I’m drawn to the possibility that life could understand its own situation much more fully. We’ve learned an extraordinary amount about how reality works, and there’s still so much we don’t know. I find the idea of eventually understanding everything compelling, even if I have no idea whether that endpoint is possible. It gives our curiosity somewhere to go.

Alongside that curiosity, I have a fairly simple starting point for what a good direction looks like: more healthy and fulfilling time for living things, a deeper understanding of reality, and the ability to coexist peacefully enough to pursue both. I mean living things broadly. Human beings are part of a much larger world of life, and our decisions affect its experience and future too.

I use the phrase “existential relevance” to think about how our actions relate to that direction. Does what we’re doing improve the experience of being alive? Does it help us understand something? Does it make us better able to live and work together? Those questions give me a way to evaluate a project, a job, or an institution. They also give people something to disagree with, which is useful. A definition of meaning should be open to scrutiny.

The difficulty is that we make these decisions inside systems that are already pointing us somewhere. Economies reward certain kinds of work. Governments encourage some behaviors and prohibit others. Religions offer explanations of our existence and paths for living within it. Together, these institutions shape what we notice, what we pursue, and what seems possible. I think of them as civilization’s operating system.

There’s a lot to appreciate about that system. People who have never met can cooperate to grow food, build cities, discover medicines, and exchange knowledge. Money has been an incredible tool for making that happen. It lets millions of people decide what to support and gives others a reason to provide it.

But the connection between making money and doing something valuable is imperfect. There can be a strong financial reward for getting someone to spend more time looking at ads, while work that could prevent suffering or answer an important scientific question struggles to find support. When the reward drifts away from the outcome we care about, people can follow the incentives successfully while our shared future suffers.

I’ve felt the tension between personal interest and financial viability in my own work. I spent three years trying to bring back the Worlds Fair. We organized technology festivals that I found exciting, but they couldn’t generate enough money to finance their growth. We changed direction and built Ai4, an AI conference for businesses. Finding a model that worked financially made it possible to keep building. It also kept me thinking about how to bring fulfillment and financial sustainability closer together.

That question gets more interesting at the scale of civilization. How much worthwhile work never gets started because it doesn’t fit the incentives we’ve built? And could we change those incentives so that more people can support themselves by doing work they believe matters?

I think we can improve the connection. To do that, we need to become more aware of what we’re collectively doing: where our effort goes, what it’s accomplishing, and which possibilities we’re overlooking. We also need better ways to discuss what deserves support. Institutions are things people have developed over time. We can study how they work, preserve what they do well, and experiment with improvements.

This is part of what interests me about the internet and AI. They give us new ways to pool knowledge, examine complicated problems, and help people understand ideas that are still taking shape. A possible future becomes easier to discuss when more people can see what it might look like. A worthwhile project becomes easier to pursue when the people capable of contributing can find it and each other.

There’s enormous creativity in letting people choose where to contribute. A city takes shape through countless decisions by people building different things within it. I’d like our systems to make that kind of participation easier while helping us understand where all those decisions are taking us. Keeping the present functioning is meaningful work too. The question is whether we’re also making enough room for experiments whose value is uncertain or far away.

My interest in aging brings these ideas to a concrete problem. More healthy time gives us more opportunity to experience the world, form relationships, learn, and pursue what we care about. Through Optional Bio, I’m exploring whether we can prevent or reverse some of the functional decline that takes those possibilities away. It’s one place where I can try to connect a broad idea of what matters with work that might actually help.

I expect my ideas about how to do that to change. Some projects will prove impractical. Some assumptions will turn out to be wrong. I want to learn enough from each attempt to make the next decision better, and I want other people to be able to challenge the reasoning along the way.

For now, choosing what to do next means acting with an incomplete picture and paying attention to what happens.

I’m taking my best guess.