What If Atlantis Is Still Ahead of Us?
On AI, abundance, enlightenment, and the extraordinary possibility of giving humanity a fairer shot at being human.
There’s something obscenely exhilarating about watching an idea come to life.
I could think of some ridiculous concept over coffee, describe it to an AI, and find myself interacting with a working prototype before lunch. Something that might have previously required developers, funding, months of coordination, and several meetings that could have been emails.
Now? A few prompts, some iterations, a little imagination, and suddenly something exists that didn’t exist an hour ago.
And here’s the kicker. The greatest thrill isn’t necessarily seeing my original idea come to life.
It’s discovering that the thing I’ve created can do something I hadn’t even imagined.
That opens another possibility. Which leads to another. And another.
It’s a recursive dance between human imagination and artificial intelligence. I imagine, it generates, I discover, we iterate. Each iteration expands the possibilities available to the next.
I find that genuinely intoxicating.
Not because I think I’m some kind of technological genius. Quite the opposite. It’s the realization that the distance between what if and what is is collapsing before our eyes.
And I think we’re only beginning to appreciate what that means.
The peculiar privilege of being a millennial
I was born in 1988.
Which means I belong to a rather peculiar generation that remembers what life felt like before the internet became the operating system of everyday existence.
We grew up with VHS tapes, landlines, physical encyclopedias, and the occasional existential crisis of waiting for a webpage to load.
Then came the internet. CDs gave way to MP3s. Phones became computers. Computers became portals to virtually everything. Streaming replaced physical media. Entire industries appeared, transformed, and became obsolete within our lifetime.
And now AI.
I don’t necessarily think millennials are smarter or more technologically capable than Gen Z or Alpha. But I suspect we possess a particular kind of historical intuition.
We remember the world before these possibilities existed.
We have a living point of comparison.
A child born today might consider speaking to an intelligent machine completely ordinary. I remember when speaking to a computer was something you watched on Star Trek.
That difference matters.
We’ve witnessed acceleration upon acceleration. Not necessarily mathematical exponential growth in every technological domain, but an extraordinary convergence of breakthroughs that enable further breakthroughs.
Technology helping us invent better technology, which accelerates our ability to invent the next generation of technology.
Exponential growth exponentially exponentializing the exponents.
Yes, that’s probably a mathematical monstrosity. You get my point.
But here’s where my fascination starts turning philosophical.
What happens when this acceleration stops merely improving our conveniences and starts fundamentally changing the conditions of human existence?
Imagine downloading a birthday present
Here’s a ridiculous thought experiment.
Suppose advanced manufacturing becomes sufficiently accessible that households eventually have something resembling a universal fabrication machine.
A sophisticated descendant of today’s 3D printers, combined with automated chemistry, robotics, advanced materials, and extraordinarily cheap computing.
Your friend’s birthday is tomorrow.
Instead of ordering a gift, waiting for shipping, worrying about delivery dates, and hoping the courier doesn’t decide your parcel belongs in another dimension, you download a manufacturing specification.
A toolbox, perhaps.
Your friend’s machine fabricates it locally.
Or imagine perfume.
You describe a fragrance to an AI. Something with sandalwood, petrichor, a little citrus, and the atmosphere of a Kyoto garden after rainfall.
An advanced chemical fabrication system interprets the formulation, uses suitable physical feedstocks, and produces the fragrance.
The science required to make such a system broadly practical is immense. Chemical safety, material availability, energy, and manufacturing precision don’t magically disappear.
But that’s precisely why I find the thought exciting.
We aren’t talking about violating physics.
We’re talking about imagining an entirely different relationship between information and physical production.
What if we could eventually transmit the instructions for making things almost as easily as we transmit pictures today?
Suddenly the internet isn’t merely a network for sharing information.
It becomes part of a distributed manufacturing infrastructure.
And that’s just one use case I thought of while entertaining the idea.
Imagine the possibilities we haven’t thought of yet.
Now, let’s talk about Pedro
This is where I think the conversation becomes much more important than fancy printers and personalized perfumes.
Imagine Pedro.
Pedro lives in a poor community somewhere in Pampanga. He has a wife, children, and a household that depends on his ability to put food on the table.
Pedro might possess extraordinary intellectual potential. Perhaps he’d make a brilliant philosopher, scientist, artist, or teacher.
But Pedro doesn’t have the luxury of spending his afternoon contemplating the nature of consciousness.
He’s thinking about dinner.
He’s thinking about his children’s tuition.
He’s thinking about what happens if someone gets sick.
Tomorrow’s expenses are already competing with today’s income.
Now tell Pedro he should spend more time practicing Stoicism, exploring metaphysics, cultivating emotional intelligence, and pursuing enlightenment.
Good luck with that.
It’s not that Pedro is incapable of wisdom. He may already possess a kind of practical wisdom that more privileged people would struggle to acquire.
But his circumstances severely limit the freedom he has to explore everything else he might become.
And that’s the point I keep coming back to.
Being born into poverty in the Philippines shouldn’t mean starting life on ARK: Survival Evolved’s most unforgiving difficulty setting.
Yet for millions of people, the circumstances of their birth determine just how much of their energy must be spent simply surviving.
This is where I see AI, automation, and the broader technological revolution offering something far more consequential than increased productivity.
What if we could progressively reduce those constraints?
What if food, healthcare, education, energy, and access to sophisticated intellectual assistance became dramatically more abundant?
What if Pedro’s children could receive the kind of personalized education that today would require exceptional teachers, expensive institutions, and considerable privilege?
What if Pedro himself finally had enough breathing room to explore interests beyond tomorrow’s survival?
I’m not suggesting everyone automatically becomes a philosopher.
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I’m asking what happens when vastly more people are finally given the opportunity.
What if the greatest achievement of technological abundance is simply giving humanity a better chance to become its best self?
Then we see what happens.
Today’s Buddha, tomorrow’s baseline
Here’s another idea I find fascinating.
We tend to think of enlightenment as something extraordinary. The product of exceptional discipline, wisdom, introspection, and perhaps spiritual realization.
But human civilization has repeatedly transformed what was once extraordinary into something increasingly ordinary.
Literacy was once restricted to relatively small segments of society. Today, billions can read and write.
Capabilities that would have appeared almost supernatural to earlier civilizations have become ordinary features of modern life.
And I wonder whether something similar could happen with the higher dimensions of human development.
Emotional regulation. Metacognition. Critical thinking. Compassion. Philosophical reasoning. The ability to recognize one’s own cognitive biases and understand perspectives beyond one’s immediate experience.
What if these become progressively more accessible, teachable, and deeply integrated into everyday human development?
Not because AI magically increases everyone’s IQ.
But because increasingly sophisticated tools and improving living conditions make it easier for people to develop capacities that were previously difficult to cultivate.
Today’s Buddha could be tomorrow’s baseline capacity for mental grace.
And perhaps our great-grandchildren will discover an entirely new tier of what I can only describe as god sparkliness.
I’m only half joking.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
Perhaps what we currently regard as humanity’s highest intellectual and spiritual achievements represent only one stage in a much longer journey.
There might be forms of understanding, perception, and consciousness that our present conceptual frameworks cannot adequately describe.
That’s part of what I’ve been exploring through SIGURU, my ongoing philosophical experiment with infinity, continuity, uncertainty, and the possibilities contained within existence.
One recurring intuition is that what we regard as a final understanding may simply be another configuration from which further possibilities emerge.
A threshold mistaken for a destination.
A beginning disguised as a conclusion.
I’m not presenting this as established science. I’m entertaining the possibility that our understanding of human potential is profoundly incomplete.
And that possibility excites me.
Could abundance make humanity better?
Inevitably, someone will point out that intelligent people can still be selfish, cruel, manipulative, and spectacularly stupid.
Of course they can.
I’m not proposing that intelligence automatically produces goodness.
I’m proposing something different.
Scarcity itself can prevent people from developing the capacities that might help them become better.
When survival consumes your attention, long-term thinking becomes harder. When education is inaccessible, intellectual potential goes unrealized. When life is dominated by insecurity, people have fewer opportunities to explore, reflect, and develop.
Now imagine progressively removing those constraints.
What might happen to human behavior across generations?
Perhaps people become better equipped to understand consequences, regulate impulses, cooperate, and recognize the shared benefits of building functioning societies.
Perhaps better institutions and increasingly capable AI systems reinforce those developments.
Perhaps greater material security creates more room for generosity, intellectual curiosity, and meaningful relationships.
None of that is guaranteed.
But why assume the ceiling of human development must remain where it is today?
Why should we treat our present psychological and social limitations as permanent properties of the species?
I have more faith in the possibilities of human development than that.
And perhaps the interesting question isn’t whether we can somehow engineer a perfect civilization.
It’s what happens when we give increasingly large portions of humanity the opportunity to live without constantly fighting for the basics.
Atlantis, or something like it
I’ve been entertaining the idea that all these developments might eventually converge into something resembling a golden age.
Call it Atlantis.
Not necessarily the mythical civilization. More the idea of a society in which abundance, intelligence, wisdom, and creativity coexist on a scale we haven’t previously experienced.
A civilization where access to extraordinary capabilities is no longer determined primarily by wealth or birthplace.
Where an individual can turn imagination into reality without needing an enormous institution to make it possible.
Where a child growing up in Pampanga can explore mathematics, music, astronomy, philosophy, engineering, or whatever obscure curiosity happens to capture their imagination.
Where education increasingly equips people not merely to participate in an economy, but to understand themselves and the world around them.
And where people possess enough freedom from necessity to seriously consider what a meaningful life ought to look like.
The really extraordinary part?
That might not even be the final destination.
Just another baseline from which humanity discovers possibilities that currently sound like absolute nonsense.
Much as our present civilization would have sounded to someone living a few centuries ago.
I don’t know whether we’ll get there.
I don’t know how long it might take, what obstacles we’ll encounter, or what entirely unexpected developments could change the trajectory.
But I do think we’re living through an extraordinary moment in human history.
For the first time in my lifetime, I can imagine a plausible technological trajectory where many of the constraints that have defined human existence for millennia become dramatically less restrictive.
And I get to experiment with tiny fragments of that possibility right now.
Every agent I build. Every strange idea I prototype. Every unexpected capability I discover.
Small, imperfect glimpses of what happens when imagination gains increasingly powerful means of expression.
Maybe we’ll use these tools to make existing systems faster.
Maybe we’ll use them to reinvent those systems entirely.
Or perhaps, given enough time, we’ll discover that their greatest contribution wasn’t helping us do more things.
It was giving more people the freedom to discover who they could become.
Maybe Atlantis isn’t a civilization we lost.
Maybe it’s one we haven’t built yet.
And maybe Pedro deserves a chance to help build it.
