What if, in the final accounting, our societal progress is the blunt sum of our collective struggles and aspirations? What if our progress as an Earthen society is not based on the genius insights of a beloved few, but rather on the slow, plodding accumulation of knowledge from one generation to the next? What if -- to take this thought experiment to its natural conclusion -- an accurate way of understanding all of human progress is to reduce it to the volume of humans unleashed on that problem -- that, given enough time and humans, all past and future societal advances are inevitable?
Maybe we mastered fire not because of a singular brilliant ancestor, but because the amalgam of any set of one million humans is statistically likely to have mastered fire. Maybe upon reaching one hundred million humans, agriculture was inevitable. Maybe calculus after one billion, electricity after fifty billion, and quantum mechanics after 100 billion.
But for this to make sense, clearly it couldn't be just any assemblage of humans. This would have to be fully sapiosentient, self-aware humans who were well on their own journey toward maximizing their individual potential. Only within this context might this brute force method of advancement begin to make sense.
If this alternate view of progress is to be taken seriously, it suggests that all of us are entirely essential to our collective aspirations. That none of us should be discounted, our sapience or sentience muted, our path toward personal maximization hampered. A beauty hidden within this view is that it both honors the individual accomplishments of our esteemed minds -- Einsteins, Faradays, Hawkins -- but contextualizes them within the larger diaspora that is the collective human experience. Said differently, Hawkins without the rest of us never ascends to be fully Hawkins; Einstein without the rest of us never enjoys the revelations that give rise to Einstein.
This view also inspires a clear path forward: we all benefit when the global society progresses, therefore it is in our self interest to propel all of society forward. Maybe we haven’t achieved reactionless propulsion yet because that requires a society of five hundred billion sapiosentient, maximized societal participants. Maybe strong general AI comes along at one trillion. Maybe full massenergy manipulation at one quadrillion and full spacetime manipulation at fifty quadrillion. Perhaps the capacity to alter the fundamental constants of the universe comes at one quintillion. In this alternate view of progress, perhaps our obligation today is to consider which steps best propel the current human society in the direction of a society populated by one quintillion sapiosentient, maximized individuals (1SQ or 1squint). What might that entail?
