“What if the world had one GPU per person?” That’s the question the GPU World writing challenge is asking the internet. And with a 1,000–5,000 word scope and a $100,000 prize pool, imagining answers is both accessible and appealing.
The assignment: Today’s access to intelligence is capped by the short supply of GPUs. What if AI development never went beyond 2026 levels, but hardware became so cheap that every person in the world had their own dedicated GPU by 2040?
Implicit in the brief is the belief that more intelligence is good. That is, I think, correct. LLMs have unlocked improvements in coding, math proof formalization, and video rendering, to name just a few. It’s exciting to imagine what we could do with more, cheaper access to those capabilities.
So, sure, humanity needs more intelligence. But it needs something else even more.
Consider a technology as revolutionary as LLMs: the internet. We’ve had access to this groundbreaking technology for the past 30-odd years, with an estimated 6 billion people connected today. It enabled new businesses and products, new ways to work and new forms of entertainment. And with the advent of the smartphone, people have been able to carry the internet everywhere they go.
These technologies brought huge improvements, many of which life-changing — we wouldn’t be interacting right now without them. But when I think about the fact that billions of people have in their pocket a machine orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers that won the space race, with instant access to information, communication, and commerce, and then I look at the world around us, I wonder why all this power hasn’t translated to more freedom and abundance. As J. Storrs Hall asks, where is my flying car?
The technological capabilities are there, but there seems to be a bottleneck to how much value we can actually create with them. My guess is that the bottleneck is culture.
Culture is its own kind of technology. It’s the set of memes1 that guide how we behave and interact.
Maybe the biologist E.O. Wilson had a point when he said, “the real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
Making progress in the realm of atoms and bits seems to be easier than making progress in how we relate to each other and ourselves. But that’s not surprising: atoms and bits are inert and predictable; people are creative and unpredictable. In fact, it’s thanks to creativity that we reached “god-like” technology despite our limitations. It’s creativity that allows us to overcome our emotions and improve our institutions.
Sure, we need more GPUs. We need more technological improvements of all kinds. But the one technology that we need to improve the most is our culture.
We need more of that cultural technology that gave us the Enlightenment, the West, and the scientific revolution. Without it, intelligence will end up like the internet: more and more people will get access to it, but the collective won’t benefit as much.
Karl Popper identified criticism, the rejection of dogma and search for errors in current explanations, as the crucial ingredient that made the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment possible, and with them, eventually, the institutional innovations that allowed people to invent the internet and GPUs. He traced it back to the pre-Socratic philosophers of Ancient Greece, such as Xenophanes, with his inquiry into the limits of certainty.
It’s through criticism and fallibilism, through looking for errors and trying to fix them, that we can improve our culture and institutions. And improve they must, if we want them to support progress in a world of 280-character tweets, 30-second TikToks, and sycophantic personal AIs.
So I’d like to propose a companion writing challenge inspired by GPU World, unfortunately with no prize pool, but hopefully just as thought-provoking. Let’s call it Enlightenment World.
Here’s the brief:
The Enlightenment revolution has only just begun to affect humanity, and billions of humans have yet to so much as experience living in an open society that values criticism and error detection and correction. This is in large part because anti-rational memes are easy to generate but hard to eradicate: humanity is culture-poor.
This could increase, however, as creative people show how conjecture and criticism generate progress and inspire others. Someday, the values of the Enlightenment might be part of every human being’s operating system and of the societies in which they live.
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like if our institutions, at every scale, private and public, engage in a search for truth instead of status, driven by criticism instead of tribalism? How far could personal liberties reach? Will education be revolutionized by encouraging individual pursuits? Will social media operate on an engine other than engagement? What developments will arise from across the globe?
The tradition of criticism that created the world we live in today holds the potential to be far more transformative than any of the individual technologies it produced.
I invite you to imagine this enlightened future.
Just to be clear, the memes discussed here are the Richard Dawkins memes, not the internet ones. See Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, ch. 11, “Memes: The New Replicators,” and David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, ch. 15, “The Evolution of Culture.”