Abundance, Intelligence, and Immortality
Why I am an optimist about the next century — and what an age of abundance, intelligence, and longer life asks of those who help build it.
By Kevin Michael Segal
I am an optimist, and I think the case for optimism has never been stronger. Within the lifetimes of people already born, three of the oldest constraints on human life — scarcity, the limits of a single mind, and aging itself — have become, for the first time, the kind of problems that can be worked on. I do not say solved. I say worked on. That alone is new, and it changes everything that follows.
Abundance
For all of history, the organizing fact of human life has been that there is not enough — not enough food, energy, medicine, shelter, or time. We are learning to make these things so cheaply and so cleanly that “not enough” can become “enough for everyone.” Abundance, rightly understood, is not luxury. It is the end of the cruelty that scarcity has always licensed.
Intelligence
We are also, for the first time, building minds. Human intelligence amplified, and machine intelligence emerging, are about to enlarge what can be understood, cured, and created. The promise is staggering, and so is the responsibility. The task is to keep that intelligence aligned with human flourishing — and to share it far beyond the few who first hold it.
Immortality
And then there is the oldest constraint of all. Aging is not a law we are required to accept without question; it is a problem, and problems can be studied. I believe the patient effort to extend healthy human life is among the most important work of this century. The hardest part is not the biology. It is the justice: a longer life is only a gift if we extend it to everyone.
These are gifts only if they reach everyone.
None of this is prophecy, and none of it is guaranteed. Abundance, intelligence, and longer life can arrive narrowly, for the fortunate, or they can arrive for all of us, with our humanity intact. Which of those happens is not, in the end, a question of technology. It is a question of intention — of the institutions we are willing to build now to be worthy of the powers we are about to hold. The Segal Organization exists, in part, to take that question seriously.