On Being Confident in a Brighter Future

Last week, I had the distinguished privilege to address my fellow classmates as a speaker at Middlebury’s commencement ceremony for the Class of 2020 (alongside my incredibly talented and eloquent classmate Mollie Smith). After two years of pandemic related delay, the incredible joy of being able to finally return to campus and complete a ceremonial graduation surrounded by so many friends and loved ones was only made all the more special by being able to stand on stage and speak from the heart, and for that opportunity I am forever grateful.

When I originally composed my speech this past Spring, I wrote it with the unique set challenges my fellow classmates and I had faced over the past few years in mind – being suddenly and unceremoniously uprooted from our home of the past four years, being separated from our social, academic, and professional relationships, and being cast off into a world filled with uncommon strife and turmoil.

However, rather than focusing on the “what could have been”, I wanted my speech to focus on the “what could be” element of our situation – the opportunity present in every challenge, the learning established by venturing out into the unknown, and the creativity fostered when solving complex problems.

In doing so, I urged my fellow classmates (and all those present) to not only see our unique situation as one that will ultimately make us more resilient, closer together, and wiser, but to also recognize that in many ways we have already been pursuing this ideal of "growth in the face of adversity" for some time now. In the two years between our technical graduation in the Spring of 2020 and our official “ceremonial” graduation in May of 2022, the Middlebury Class of 2020 had already begun to venture out and leave their positive impact on this world. As I noted in my speech, “The Class of 2020 is already made up of teachers, environmental activists, future doctors and lawyers, pro athletes and Olympic hopefuls, investigative reporters, models, bankers, artists, volunteers, and entrepreneurs… and we are only two years into our post collegiate journey.”

It should be patently clear, then, that if we have been able to venture out into one of the most complex, divisive, and chaotic periods in modern history and nevertheless establish the foundations for a successful future, then we ought to, more than anything, be confident. Confident that we can handle and overcome adversity, confident that we can grow and learn from our mistakes and emerge better than before, and confident that we can find and forge a path towards success without a well-laid plan in place. As I stress throughout my speech, “We no longer need to wonder if we can do this – we know that we can do this. Indeed we have already completed the hardest part of all: the first step, that initial ‘0 to 1’ moment on the infinite path towards greater and greater heights, always improving and always rising to the next challenge. We know that we can do it because we have already begun.”

After delivering this commencement address, however, I began to think a little more broadly about the underlying theme of the speech – that we ought to be confident that our legacy of navigating turbulent times has laid the foundation for us to overcome future obstacles and create innovative solutions to complex problems. In doing so I realized that, in many ways, this message was applicable not just to the graduates of the collective class of 2020, but to our society at large: The human class of 12,000 BCE (approximately the beginning of the Anthropocene).

Whether it be Covid, the recent war in Ukraine, the ongoing existential threat of climate change, or even the fractious political climate, I often encounter those who claim something along the lines of: “This is the worst era in history to [be born, live in America, be alive]” or “Why would I want to raise kids or a family in this environment?” or even “What’s the point of trying to fix things anyways, we are already too late and everything is screwed.” While I understand where these opinions are coming from, I think they are pretty ignorant points of view because they completely (and conveniently) ignore pretty much everything the human class of 12,000 BCE has done during its "undergrad years", so to speak.

To be sure, it is true that our species today faces the most complicated and grave existential threats it has ever encountered – threats which seem to lack clear boundaries, transcend periods of time, and be so viscous that they “touch and stick” to nearly every aspect of our lives. These “multi-dimensional knots” have been coined as “Hyperobjects” by Rice University Professor Timothy Morton. I, however, prefer to refer to them specifically as “hyperproblems”.

Why the decomposition from "Hyperobjects" into "hyperproblems" as a pejorative? Because I believe that there also exists another side to this coin, a proverbial “hypersolution” – something which is so anti-fragile, creative, and powerful that it can do multi-dimensional battle with these so-called "Hyperobjects" and emerge victorious.

As it turns out, the human class of 12,000 BCE has historically been extremely good at generating these "hypersolutions". Language, the wheel, and the manipulation of fire are a few such examples, but many more have appeared over time as well, including writing, agriculture, and mathematics among others. What is notable, however, is that we seem to be getting better and better at generating these "hypersolutions" over time, not less. In only the past 400 years, a mere 15 generations, the human class of 12000 BCE has produced a prodigious number of "hypersolutions", and at an accelerating pace: the scientific method, the steam engine, electricity, modern biology, nuclear power and renewable energy, the internet, CRISPR, exoplanetary travel, blockchain – and there are clear indications of many more just on the horizon: eradication of diseases, fusion energy, quantum computing, habitation of other planets, etc.

The result of this accelerated "hypersolution" creation has also been nothing short of extraordinary. For example: in 1300 CE if someone became ill, they were given incenses and a local monk recited a prayer on their behalf - and that's if they were lucky. If they were less so, they may have had their blood drained or had a part of their head removed. (Needless to say, these procedures did not help sick patients recover). Is it any wonder then that the average life expectancy during this time period was close to 40? Compare that scenario with falling ill in the 21st century. Today if someone is sick, they can contact a doctor (either in person or remotely) who has years of medical knowledge and experience at their disposal, go to a drugstore where an astounding array of mass manufactured medicines are widely available (and whose properties are rigorously studied and well-known), consult the largest corpus of medical information in the world: the internet, or even take genetic tests to understand their ailment at the molecular or cellular level. As a result of all this progress, it is likely not surprising to hear that in the developed world today, the average life expectancy is close to 80.

In the event that the reader is still unconvinced (perhaps the preceding paragraph was too "vague"), consider the medical miracle that is the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. When Covid first appeared some two and a half years ago, public perception was that it would take many years of labor intensive, complex, and expensive trial and error to develop a working vaccine, and then several more years to mass produce it and make it widely available to the public. In reality, it took only a single month between the time that the genetic sequence of the Covid-19 virus was first made available (on Jan 11th 2020) and the time when Moderna had developed its first vaccine dose for testing (on Feb 24th 2020). From there, it only took a single additional month for Moderna to begin initial human trials (on March 16th 2020). 30,000 test subjects later, on Dec 18th 2020, the FDA and CDC authorized the vaccine for public use and on Dec 21st 2020 it was made available to frontline workers nationwide. All that, from initial genetic sequence to approval and mass production, in only 11 months. The sheer magnitude of this scientific triumph truly cannot be overstated. For comparison, the cure for Tuberculosis took 13 years to develop, the Polio vaccine took 16 years, and the Hepatitis B vaccine took 23 years. It took us just 11 months to develop a working vaccine, for a novel disease, from scratch. 11 months. Let that sink in for a second.

While the Tuberculosis, Polio, and Hepatitis B vaccines have literally saved millions of lives and without a doubt improved the quality of life for billions more, how many years of death and suffering did we nevertheless have to endure while these vaccines were in development? Imagine how many lives could have been saved if we had access then to the same genetic sequencing technology, supercomputing power, and precise manufacturing that we have today? All of these technologies have only just come into being over the past 10-20 years, and yet their impact on our society and quality of life has already been nothing short of incredible.

But perhaps even more extraordinary than how far we've already come is where we are headed. By 2050, as a collective species we will elevate 3 billion additional people out of poverty and into the middle class, we will provide 3 billion individuals with access to the most powerful informational tool ever created: the internet, and we will educate enough people into literacy such that >88% of all able individuals on the planet will be able to read.

How will we attain these momentous achievements? I mean, it certainly doesn’t feel like we are on the precipice of eliminating diseases or generating unlimited clean energy... And besides, how do we deal with the problems of tomorrow anyway? Ones which may be “totally different”, "unpredictable", and “way [worse, harder, more difficult, complex] than ever before”?

The answer is actually quite simple. We roll up our sleeves and begin to experiment. We engage intelligent and creative minds. We gather varied and diverse opinions. And we do what we as human beings do best (and what we’ve been doing since the very beginning): build on the knowledge of the past bit by bit, constantly learning from our mistakes and reinventing new ways of doing things until the collective result is far more powerful than the simple sum of its parts.

From my perspective, the greatest challenge our species faces today is not a technical one. Rather, it is a lack of confidence. It is easy to look at enormous, dire problems and become depressed and pessimistic because they loom large right in front of us – they are already here. Meanwhile, the “solution” to these problems and the “end state” of having successfully overcome these threats is barely visible off on the horizon, seemingly far out of reach. Thus, it is easy to get caught in the illusion that our problems today appear insurmountable while any potential solutions are far too distant to be of any use - in essence, we're screwed.

However, this illusion is completely ignorant to how exponential progress works. The graph of exponential progress does not look like this:

It looks like this:

Clearly, these two graphs end up at very different points in the limit - the first may not reach the critical threshold needed to overcome adversity in time, while the second will more than exceed the threshold needed to overcome present challenges. But, if one choses to ignore (or perhaps even deceptively manipulate) the axes of both graphs, it is easy to make both of these very different lines look similar over short periods of time early on:

However, if one were to properly zoom out and look at the big picture over even modest timescales, they would find that these two lines are indeed headed in very different directions:

Part of this "fallacy of too little, too late" stems from the fact that our society has become conditioned to instant results. Ironically, from a historical and geologic perspective, human progress has recently advanced more rapidly, and in a shorter amount of time, than ever before - the period from 1600 CE to the present day being essentially just a mere instant against the backdrop of Earth's existence. However, while progress is certainly not "instant", we are getting smarter, optimizing better, and becoming more resilient at a faster rate than any time in history. Moreover, as all these successive achievements continue to combine and build on one another, the level of progress we see will further accelerate as we go. In this sense, we ought to come out of this pandemic with a strong sense of iterative success, having added "triumph over global pandemic" to our human class of 12000 BCE toolkit, with all the technologies and information we gained during its unfortunate tenure now poised to be constructively applied to the next challenge at hand.

That said, now is certainly not the time to rest on our laurels. We are indeed still racing the clock against a myriad of complex and dizzying issues which have morphed into "hyperproblems". But, if human progress has taught us anything over the past few years, it is that we are just as capable of producing "hypersolutions" which we can use to overcome these challenges and rise above them. Thus, there has actually never been a worse time in history to be a pessimist, and there has never been a better time to be confident that we as a species have developed the collective tools and models to overcome challenges and uncertainty.

Importantly, there is also an active component inherent to this "hypersolution generation" worth briefly mentioning here as well. To put it simply: progress is not achieved passively, but actively. It is shaped and crafted by selecting the wise choice among many alternatives, not by happenstance. As Aristotle said: "Choice, not chance, determines your destiny" – thus, so too is our own future actively shaped by our collective hands today. Furthermore, as a species we have never had access to a more powerful, robust set of tools with which to shape our destiny, and consequently there has never been a better time in history to get actively involved and help build the future into what we want it to be, while there has never been a worse time in history to remain apathetic or passive.

So, while it is true that the future will contain a vast array of difficulties and challenges for us (both personally and as a species), we all ought to be confident that our history of iterative, incremental progress will eventually lead us to incredible achievements. Think of it like a series of successive multiplications of (1.01) done each day - a mere 1% incremental improvement over yesterday. Perform that operation iteratively a few dozen times and the number is now double what it was at the start. Do it a few more times and the number is ten times the original. Do it once a day for a year (i.e. 365 iterations) and the number is now over 37 times the original. Thus, even simply getting just 1% better each day can have enormous consequences. A 1% improvement each day seems well within our reach, don't you think?

Ultimately then, we really ought to be confident that consistent, incremental progress will get us where we want to go. We ought to be confident that the foundations we laid during our time together since the beginning of the Anthropocene will enable us to meet and overcome future challenges. And above all, we ought to be confident that the answer to the question "Will humanity emerge from these difficult and trying times victorious?" - is "Absolutely".

#1 in the "Why the Future is Brighter than it Seems" series