The Most Persuasive Future We Imagine Wins, Not the Noblest or Most Accurate

And why accurate and noble narratives about the future can only mobilize collective action if the people can build and describe this future together.

The best writers design spaces that reveal, give birth to, or discuss new ideas, emotions, and behaviors. They express what didn't exist or what existed, but we don't know how to describe.

Take Sophocles, for instance. The titular character of his play, Antigone, is a recurring hero in feminist discourse. She challenges the king, written scripture, and authorities to defend what she believes is right: to do the illegal act of giving her brother a burial aligned with divine law. 

Her sister Ismene warns,

 "We will die so cruelly if we dare to break the law or scant the tyrants' vote and spurn his power. "We must also bear in mind that we are women, not meant to wage war with men…trying to do more than we can makes no sense at all." 

"To die in shame," says Antigone, "would be much worse."

We still have gender inequalities, but thanks to writers like Sophocles, Euripides, Atwood, and Woolf, some people at least wondered, what if we didn't have these inequalities? Readers acted based on that wonder, and others will.

In contrast, writers can also describe persuasive negative realities that reduce our likelihood of believing or living in better ones. I have been interacting with more AI researchers since 2024, and I was baffled to learn how fascinated some of them are with Herbert's Dune. Swinging on a hammock, one half-smiled and said, "What if we reach a point of near extinction and revolve society around one Good? The previous question he had asked was if anyone wanted water. I know he was referring to a hypothetical, thought-provoking scenario. But a macabre, utilitarian, and likely holder of dark triad personality traits could test it after learning it's a "possible" reality.

I expose myself to narratives at the extremes of hope because, in history, the most persuasive narratives win, not the most noble or truest. Narratives of witches, the Aryan race, and a gender who could not vote won at one point. Those about the presence of biological determinism, mental health disorders, ethnic superiority, and many others still have a chance to do so.

I. There are more narratives than ever before

The internet allows for an infinite and increasing number of arguments in favor of and against narratives. Amateurs, isolated elites, and utilitarians share equally persuasive stories like the ones shared by once-holders of a monopolized media market. 

Life has always had noisy speculators about an uncertain future. In the AI decade, though, life seems at least as uncertain as in periods of global transition, such as the Industrial Revolution. K-12 STEM curriculum designers tell me they still know what to teach kids about AI. They feel they must still do it because the downsides of not keeping up seem worse than the potential imagined upsides. I see this cluelessness on what to do about AI–and which narrative to write or support–in other areas, such as policy, ethics, finance, transportation, healthcare, legal system, and societal norms.

I reference writing because it's the art form I have devoted myself to through my work in communications, personal research, and intellectual exploration. However, movies, poetry, paintings, and Generative AI also present narratives about a better future. Maybe we want to reach a point where it feels like these other art forms "must" show them. We need help reaching futures with traits that still not enough humans aspire for, such as a future where we see human rights, data privacy, data alignment, and biosecurity as vital as breathing.

If we, as humans, truly believed in the importance of human rights and had implemented the necessary changes to abide by them, there would be no need for ten-page reports that justify the killing of innocent children.

II. We have fewer shared narratives than ever before

More is needed for change than to have a positive narrative. Accurate and noble narratives about the future can only mobilize collective action if the people can build this future together. 

Based on my experiences living on three continents, scientific research, and other reports, I perceive that people in the same neighborhood, city, and country more often support different narratives. Fifteen years ago, I could have guessed my neighbor's hobbies, religion, and beliefs. In 2024, I'm writing this essay from Mexico City, where some neighbors think the city is safe, while others believe it is cheap, unaffordable, walkable, huge, or a kidnapping fest.

The few narratives we share aren't beneficial. For example, we believe we are rational. This rationality we cling to implies we can overcome every obstacle with enough thought. Some people aren't afraid of bringing us closer to catastrophic futures because they believe they can fix them, but we don't have evidence of that being true.

Not even the greatest foretellers can anticipate what will happen. In July of 2023, the Forecasting Research Institute assembled super forecasters–people with a proven track record of making very good predictions–and domain experts to assess the level of likeliness of different events:

• Certain advances in AI

• Extinction, the event that the total number of humans gets below 5,000

• Global catastrophes, events that kills >10% of the population within five years

The Turing Test is a test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both. The domain experts guessed AI will pass the Turing Test by 2045, and the superforecasters said 2060. Their answers were before GPT-4. According to writer Scott Alexander and other scientists, GPT-4 shows enough promise to solve the Turing Test before 2023.

This group the Forecasting Research Institute gathered, which I see as rationalists, were also expected to do better in other questions. Time will extend failure to other guesses, even those they have yet to make.

III. A narrative always exists, even in times of massive uncertainty

In his Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Political Theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote:

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

As media outlets compete with teenagers for attention, and we hesitate to design new positive futures, Propaganda, fake news, and decision-makers misaligned with common conceptions of human morality fill this silence with narratives that benefit them. These people are far from the trenches, wells, and floor fans. Whatever narrative they push doesn't affect them. The goal is to satisfy a morbid or profitable curiosity, and ethics, at best, is an afterthought.

IV. Language limits the realities we can design

Each language has the necessary words only to describe specific realities and circumstances. English has fewer words to express fear and love than Russian and Spanish, respectively, because such words aren't needed. 

Even if they had lived twice as long, great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates wouldn't have foreseen the internet, Web3, or singularity because they didn't have the language–reality—to describe them.

Poets are less limited by language, as they are more used to expressing the unseen or helping us do so. In 14 verses, Shakespeare's 18th Sonnet appears about poetry's immortalizing act, the experience of beauty, and someone tainting death. Still, language limited Shakespeare, Donne, and Bukowski like to any other writer.

The limits of language have always been there. New realities have always demanded such a disruptive design of what's not there that we must make up words to express this new possible world. The internet could allow for the rapid spread of some of these words. Often, though, the infinite access to horrific futures and scarcity of positive narratives only allows me to think about a new word for hope that denotes 10x the hope that hope signals.

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In The Precipice, Philosopher Toby Ord says:

"Humanity does not need to plan out the details of the rest of its life. But it needs to make plans that bear in mind the duration and broad shape of that future." 

The book discusses existential catastrophes, those that permanently destroy humanity's long-term potential. These are scenarios where a small population survives but has limited potential to improve its situation or achieve a flourishing future, with causes including natural disasters, nuclear war, engineered viruses, loss of essential knowledge, social disorder, and other foreseen and unforeseen causes. 

I once solely focused on AI's potential to regress us to pre-agricultural life, depopulation, and horrific devastations. I couldn't care about flying cars when the narratives at the other extreme detail realities where I lost what I cherished. More positive, persuasive, and better described narratives helped me think beyond the potentially bad.

The words, stories, and images each carry have always determined our ideas and sentiments throughout society and what we dare to imagine.

We haven't imagined so much: a world without deaths from preventable illnesses, universities that don't prepare you for life, bachata dancers who aren't creepy, free speech, religious acceptance, and more. I'm trying to decide which narrative to imagine first, and I should, or must, because it might be the only way to inspire you to do the same. One thing is certain: someone else will do it if we don't.