Seven years ago, in a post on the role of academia in the transition towards a Type I civilization, I argued that universities should recover something of their older civilizational mission the pursuit of Truth, Good and Beauty and help form the kind of citizens capable of building a more scientifically advanced, tolerant and genuinely planetary civilization. That argument was principally about what academia could contribute to the next stage of human development. Seven years later, the question has become considerably larger. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, longevity research and our rapidly expanding ability to understand and alter both ourselves and the planet are beginning to give humanity powers that make the old discussion about education, economic progress or even sustainability seem incomplete. The question is no longer only how we reach a more advanced civilization. It is what kind of civilization and ultimately what kind of humanity we need to become.
For most of human history, we accepted as part of the human condition whatever we were powerless to change. Disease had to be endured, pain given meaning, ageing accepted as destiny, poverty treated as inevitable, intelligence distributed by the accidents of birth. We created religions, philosophies and institutions to make the unavoidable bearable. But some of those frontiers have already fallen, and others are beginning to move. For the first time, a species possesses tools capable not merely of changing the world around it, but of altering some of the conditions that have always defined what it means to be human. We manipulate genes, model proteins, build new forms of intelligence, observe ecosystems at planetary scale and place enormous quantities of human knowledge within reach of almost anyone. These powers do not tell us what to do with them. Greater capability can liberate or dominate, distribute opportunity or concentrate it, a tension I had already explored in a previous post on AI, inequality and kleptocracy. The challenge, then, is not merely to move faster, before expanding power outruns the wisdom required to govern it, but to decide where humanity should go. Five verbs define that destination: Liberate. Know. Care. Build. Restore.
1 - Liberate
The first promise of a more advanced civilization must address what every person feels in their own body. We suffer, become ill, age, lose those we love, and spend much of our existence securing the material conditions necessary to remain alive. I had already touched on this wider question in a 2019 post, when reflecting on whether universities should prepare people not only for work, but also for life itself even, ultimately, for dying better. On 16 October 1846, in an amphitheatre in Boston, a man underwent surgery and did not scream. Until then, surgery often meant being cut open while conscious; pain was not a complication but part of the procedure. Then came a demonstration that something long treated as inseparable from existence could simply be prevented. That is the mental leap we must learn to repeat. Chronic pain, devastating depression, neurodegenerative disease, inherited disorders and many other forms of suffering have mechanisms, and what has mechanisms can be investigated. New computational tools, biotechnology and increasingly powerful forms of scientific analysis can accelerate that investigation, but the civilizational principle is older and larger than any particular technology, what can be understood may cease to be fate.
Liberation also means liberating intelligence. Srinivasa Ramanujan became known because an extraordinary mind managed to break through barriers of geography, poverty and institutions, but the important question is how many Ramanujans we never knew. How many potential scientists, mathematicians, artists and inventors disappeared without ever receiving the education or opportunity necessary to discover what they could become? Some of that loss may begin long before talent has the chance to reveal itself, as I noted in a post on the developmental effects of childhood poverty. And how much intelligence is still lost when the environments meant to cultivate it make caution safer than intellectual risk, a paradox I revisited in a previous reflection on scientific progress and failure?
Against that continuing waste of human potential, a 2023 post on emerging scientific and technological game changers had already pointed towards a world in which human knowledge might become universally accessible through increasingly powerful AI tools. For the first time, it is becoming conceivable that almost every child might have access to knowledge, personalized teaching and intellectual assistance that were once reserved for an extraordinarily fortunate minority, a possibility for which early experimental evidence is already beginning to emerge. But the goal must not merely be easier access to answers; it must be stronger, more independent human minds. Any cognitive technology should therefore face a demanding test: after using it for years, is the person more capable without it, or less? Tools that allow people to ask better questions, reason more deeply, learn faster and become more intellectually independent enlarge human capability. Tools that gradually make independent thought unnecessary ultimately diminish human agency profoundly, a danger already beginning to attract empirical attention.
The next form of liberation concerns the most finite resource we posess: time. Automation may eventually weaken one of civilization’s oldest equations, that being born means selling most of the hours of one’s life in order to survive, an equation whose absurdity, as I recalled, Fuller had already exposed decades ago. I explored the same possibility more recently in a post on human purpose in a post-work world. This does not mean the end of work, ambition or effort. It means the possibility of working because something deserves to be built, discovered, created or cared for rather than merely because the alternative is poverty. The measure of a civilization should not be only how much it can produce, but how much of a human life it can return to its owner hours no longer consumed by necessity, but available for creation, learning, care, love, curiosity and meaning. Progress reaches its highest form when it gives people back the one resource no wealth can replace, their time.
2 - Know
Liberation requires understanding, and the second great human adventure is therefore directed towards the largest territory we have ever encountered, the unknown. We do not fully understand consciousness, how matter first became life, whether life exists elsewhere, what most of the Universe consists of, how to cure countless diseases or what the limits of intelligence may be. Beyond these known mysteries lie questions we have not yet learned to ask, perhaps even about what it means for the Universe to have produced minds capable of contemplating it. That hierarchy of admiration had already troubled me in a 2019 post, where I questioned what our chosen heroes reveal about the values we collectively reward. The concern was already explicit in a post, written amid the extraordinary scientific mobilisation against Covid-19, where I questioned a culture capable of reserving its greatest admiration for those who kick a ball while treating the discovery of a life-saving vaccine almost as the mere fulfilment of professional duty. As I argued in a 2021 post contrasting Ronaldo with figures such as Gauss, Euler and Schrödinger, a civilization that lavishes admiration and cultural prestige on spectacle while relegating those who expand knowledge and human possibility to the margins has not yet learned to recognize what truly drives progress and expands civilization’s horizons. A genuinely advanced civilization will have to reorder that hierarchy of admiration and place intellectual discovery at the centre of its collective aspirations, ultimately embracing the systematic conquest of ignorance.
I returned to this argument more provocatively on January 21, 2024, in an email I distributed to several thousand colleagues, suggesting that researchers should occupy "the zenith of the societal hierarchy" in the civilization of tomorrow. The underlying point was not occupational vanity, but a reversal of civilizational prestige. Admiration is itself a form of instruction, whatever a society chooses to celebrate, its children learn to desire and eventually to become. A genuinely advanced society would therefore reveal its values not only through what it funds, but through whom and what it chooses to admire. Perhaps the deepest measure of a civilization is what it chooses to celebrate. Ours must learn to honour discovery, healing and creation with the same intensity it now devotes to spectacle: the disease finally conquered, the devastated landscape brought back to life, the new continent of knowledge opened to humanity. One day, such achievements should stand among the defining triumphs of our civilization, commanding not merely attention, but collective wonder, gratitude and awe.
Here artificial intelligence may genuinely become transformative, as I had already anticipated in a previous post on its potential to radically accelerate scientific discovery. Science is still carried out by millions of researchers who can read only a tiny fraction of the literature relevant to their work, while knowledge remains fragmented across disciplines, languages and institutions. One field may already contain the method another needs without either realizing it. AI systems may increasingly connect papers, datasets, failed experiments, competing hypotheses and unresolved questions, identifying contradictions, suggesting decisive experiments, transferring methods between disciplines and revealing relationships that no individual researcher could hold simultaneously in mind. Combined with new experimental technologies, this could substantially accelerate discovery. But the ideal should not be an oracle that supplies answers. It should be something more valuable, a machinery for producing better questions.
This power carries an equally important danger. A humanity that thinks together can think wrongly together. Coordination does not produce truth; it produces scale. Systems optimized for convenience, agreement or engagement can turn error into consensus more rapidly than any previous communication technology, while creating dangerous illusions of understanding.The intellectual infrastructure of the future must therefore preserve contradiction, uncertainty and dissent rather than smoothing them away. This also requires intellectual independence and a willingness to challenge power, a responsibility I had reflected on in a previous post on the duty of intellectuals to speak truth to power and expose falsehoods. It should make competing hypotheses visible, expose the evidence against dominant conclusions and allow reasoning to be reconstructed rather than merely accepted. A good AI increases our ability to disagree with it; a bad AI increases our dependence on believing it.
The ambition is not a hive mind. Humanity should become better connected without becoming intellectually uniform. Throughout history, brilliant minds have been separated by geography, language, class and discipline, a problem I had already approached in a previous post on interaction as an existential principle. Humanity has never thought with all of humanity, not because it lacked intelligence, but because it could not connect that intelligence without losing much of its diversity along the way. That barrier is beginning to weaken. A scientist can increasingly find an obscure result produced on another continent; a doctor in an isolated region can reach expertise previously concentrated in a handful of institutions; people without a common language can communicate directly; a child born far from any great university can approach the frontier of knowledge. The point is not that everyone should think alike. It is that no important mind should remain isolated from an important idea simply because of where it was born.
3 - Care
Knowledge creates power, but power without moral expansion can simply make us more efficient at being what we already are. The history of moral progress is, in large part, the history of boundaries that once seemed natural and later became indefensible. Family, tribe, citizenship, race, sex and class have all been used to determine who deserved protection and who did not. It would be extraordinary arrogance to believe that the circle of moral concern has finally reached its perfect boundary with us. Animals capable of pain, fear, attachment and pleasure do not become mere objects because they belong to another species, and ecosystems are more than inventories of resources awaiting human use. As our capacity to affect other forms of life grows, so must our willingness to ask what we owe them. A civilization should not be judged only by the extent of the world it can control, but also by the breadth of the world it chooses to protect. The expansion of human power must therefore be accompanied by an expansion of human concern. .As noted in a previous post, cooperation, reciprocity and mutual aid are themselves part of that shared inheritance, suggesting that competition has never been the only force shaping human possibility.
Care must also mean refusing to accept as inevitable forms of human deprivation that our growing power makes increasingly avoidable. A child should not have their health, education, intellectual development or prospects for a meaningful life determined primarily by the accident of where they were born or by the wealth of their parents. I had already explored this unequal geography of concern in a post titled "Inside the Great Black Hole: The Untermensch of the 21st Century". I later touched on the darker consequences of such inequality, discussing evidence that extreme disparities in income can contribute to domestic terrorism and recalling how deprivation, exclusion and the absence of education and meaningful opportunity can become powerful forces of radicalization and social fracture. A more advanced civilization must therefore understand that widening human possibility is not merely an act of compassion or justice; it is also part of building societies in which fewer lives are abandoned to despair, fewer talents are wasted, and fewer people are left with so little stake in the future that destruction begins to appear more meaningful than participation in it.
As civilization becomes richer in knowledge, energy, medicine and productive capacity, the moral defence of extreme deprivation becomes correspondingly weaker. This tension between human flourishing, distributive justice and ecological limits was already implicit in a previous reflection on whether a good life for all is compatible with planetary boundaries.The same concern extends to extreme concentrations of wealth and their disproportionate environmental consequences, a connection I explored more provocatively in a post titled "Carbon Manslaughter: Holding Billionaires Accountable for Their Role in Accelerating Climate Catastrophes". Before that I had reflected on a troubling asymmetry of climate adaptation, those who benefited most from an unsustainable order may be best able to shield themselves from its consequences.
I had also briefly touched on a related question in another post on the possible wider role of wealth taxation.The same principle should shape the transition to a sustainable economy: as I also noted in a previous post on carbon revenues and inequality, climate policy can be designed not merely to reduce environmental risk, but to distribute its costs and benefits more fairly. The purpose is not to make every life identical, nor to abolish difference, ambition or reward, but to establish a civilizational floor beneath which no human being should be allowed to fall simply because they began life on the wrong side of geography or fortune. Progress should therefore be judged not only by triumph of a fortunate few, but by how much preventable suffering, wasted talent and unrealized human potential it refuses to accept.
Care also means remembering what is already worth preserving. We are not trying to build a new humanity because we despise the present one. There are things in this first version of humanity that deserve to survive every version that follows, unexpected laughter around a table, friendship with no economic purpose, music, curiosity, tenderness, courage, a parent awake beside a sick child, the pleasure of understanding a difficult idea, the capacity to love, and wonder before something beautiful that does not need to justify its existence. These are not sentimental decorations around the serious business of civilization; they are part of what makes civilization worth advancing in the first place. No increase in intelligence would compensate for losing them, and no longevity would be a victory if it merely prolonged empty lives. We do not want to transcend humanity by eliminating what makes it human. We want to enlarge what allows it to flourish.
4 — Build
There are people who will be profoundly affected by our decisions and who cannot answer us. They have not yet been born. They do not vote, protest or demand compensation, yet they will inherit the climate we alter, the technologies we release, the knowledge we preserve, the resources we consume and the species we allow to survive. We exercise power over them while they can exercise none over us, and that creates profound moral responsibility. I had already questioned, in a 2019 post on civilization’s long-term trajectories, the convenient habit of ending moral responsibility at 2100. There is a particular greatness in that act: the ability to value an outcome that belongs to people who will live after us.
We need to recover that capacity. We should plant trees whose full shade we will never see, preserve species for children not yet born, fund research whose conclusion may belong to another generation, build institutions capable of surviving their founders and prevent catastrophes for which no one will thank us precisely because they never happened. Being a good ancestor should become one of the highest forms of human prestige. That horizon may, however, extend disquietingly far into the future: one 2022 estimate placed humanity’s arrival at a Type I civilization no earlier than 2371, a distinctly pessimistic projection that only strengthens the case for accelerating that civilizational transition.
The concern was not new. In a 2020 post on humanity’s “right and wrong priorities,” I had questioned the enormous resources devoted to military arsenals while climate action, sustainable development and other fundamental human needs remained chronically underfunded. I returned to the same problem in a December 31, 2024 post on the disconnect between engineering innovation and humanity’s critical challenges, asking why so much technological ingenuity remains directed towards short-term achievements while humanity’s most consequential long-term challenges remain insufficiently addressed. It also means resisting the neglect of distant but potentially catastrophic risks, a concern I raised here, about whether governments and academia devote attention proportionate to the threats civilization faces. A civilization that thinks only in electoral cycles, financial quarters or individual lifetimes could be extraordinarily powerful but temporally immature. Scientific modelling and increasingly sophisticated forecasting can help make distant consequences more visible, but no model can substitute for the moral decision to take those consequences seriously.
Before approving an irreversible technology, transforming an ecosystem or making decisions whose consequences may persist for generations, we should therefore ask not only what they cost or deliver today but which futures they close and which futures they keep open. That concern had already surfaced in a previous post reflecting on the risks of continuing to test planetary limits while assuming catastrophe can still be avoided. Thinking in this way does not mean that the unborn should rule the living. It means recognizing that the absence of their voice does not erase the reality of their interests. The future is not empty simply because its inhabitants have not yet arrived.
Building for the long term also means preserving knowledge. A civilization that hopes to last for centuries cannot allow each generation to begin intellectually almost from zero, nor can it entrust its collective memory entirely to fragile institutions or opaque technological systems. Knowledge must remain accessible, distributed, intelligible and contestable. The discoveries, failures, arguments and cultural achievements of one generation are part of the inheritance of the next. We are not the owners of civilization. We are its temporary custodians.
5 - Restore
It is not enough to stop destroying. There is too much to repair. For decades, environmentalism has largely spoken the language of less, emit less, consume less, destroy less. Much of that restraint is necessary, but no civilization falls in love with a future defined only by losing more slowly. We need a positive ambition: rivers alive again, forests returned to degraded land, whales returning to seas from which they nearly vanished, reefs rebuilt, soils recovered, species brought back from the edge of extinction. We should not aim merely to leave our descendants what remains after us. We should aim to give them a planet more alive than the one we inherited. Nor should restoration be confused with simply recreating an imagined past: in a changing climate, what it means to restore a living system must itself remain adaptive.
The same technological civilization that became extraordinarily effective at extracting from nature can become equally capable of repairing what it has damaged. Satellites, sensors, ecological modelling, biotechnology, new materials, precision agriculture and other tools can help us understand complex systems and intervene with growing sophistication. But technology is only the means. Technological repair cannot substitute for preserving living systems in the first place. The need for a more integrated regenerative economy was already implicit in a previous post on circularity, eco-innovation and climate mitigation. The deeper transformation must be cultural: restoration should cease to be regarded as a defensive response to failure and become an expression of progress in its own right. The question would no longer be only how much damage we avoided, but how much fertility, biodiversity and resilience we were able to recover how much richer in living possibilities the world became through deliberate human action.
Restoration could become one of the great human adventures of the future. Civilizations have traditionally celebrated what they could conquer, extract, build or dominate; a more mature civilization could take equal pride in what it was capable of healing and returning to abundance. Places once written off as irreversibly degraded could become flourishing landscapes again, and what one generation remembered as loss could become ordinary experience for the next. Its greatest monuments would not necessarily be towers, bridges or machines, but living inheritances whose value increases long after their creators are gone. Perhaps one of the noblest uses of human power is not merely to reduce the mark we leave on the Earth, but to ensure that life itself flourishes more richly because we were here.
