Vibe Check: The Slice of Life

Vibes are high.

This past month: the New York Knicks won their first title in 53 years.

Japanese tourist enjoying American culture.

The World Cup is on American soil.

UFC @TheWhiteHouse

The United States turned 250.

A Russian couple scaled the Empire State Building for love.

SpaceX pulled off the largest IPO in human history.

And, in the backdrop, AI advances faster than any other technological wave in human history.

After years of pandemics, polarization, and geopolitical conflict, these events feel like a cultural exhale.

People in the streets not for protests but for celebration.

I hate to jinx it, but…could this be the peak? And if it is, would we have the good sense to recognize it?

Historically, we’ve been bad at this. The Dow rose 27 percent in the 90 days before its September 1929 peak, seven weeks before the crash. On the Titanic, for over an hour after the ship struck the iceberg, people refused to board lifeboats. Lifeboat 1 left with 12 of its 40 seats filled.

And we rarely name a golden age from inside it: “The Renaissance” wasn’t christened until 1855, three and a half centuries after Michelangelo finished painting the Sistine ceiling.

The problem and the solution are the same.

We can think in four dimensions but only live in three.

In 1884, Edwin Abbott wrote a small book called Flatland, about a two-dimensional world. Its inhabitants are shapes sliding around a plane. When a three-dimensional sphere passes through, the two-dimensional shapes are perplexed: They can only ever see the slice passing through their plane, never the whole sphere.

We do the same with time. A life is a 4D shape spanning space and time, but we only ever stand in one slice of it, the present, and from inside that slice, the whole shape is invisible.

We already feel this with a single life. At a funeral, which photo do we use to memorialize someone? When they’re 8? Or 80? No single slice holds a whole existence.

A movie runs the other way from a photo. It teleports us into four-dimensional space. For two hours we watch a life from outside its own time: a hero’s journey, a romance, a tragedy. Time and lifetimes for $19.99 a month. When the credits roll, we want the same for ourselves, a soundtrack and a montage of our own. We can screen anyone’s life but our own.

So if we live as slices, how do we see the whole shape? How do we get context on the historical moment while we’re inside it? How do we look back on the present from the future?

The Flatlander is stuck as his slice. We can gain dimensionality…if we know how to ask.

“The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” Claude Lévi-Strauss

We can interrogate spacetime like an MRI: gather enough slices and a shape appears.

What would it look like for _____ to be true?

What would it look like for me to be happy?

What would it look like to succeed at this, and what would I have to do to fail?

If you never ask the question, you don’t get to be mad at the answer.

This February I asked what would have to happen for AI to be less prevalent in five years than it is today, and for the people who build proficiency in it to end up less useful. I couldn’t think of any serious answers. So, I started Prometheus.

We’re told to savor the moment. I’ve never found that much use. The harder task is recognition: naming the moment while we’re in it, with enough context to know what might come next. If we ask ourselves what a peak would look like, it might just surprise us with today.