On the Main Measure of Civilization's Progress

“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” — Oscar Wilde

If someone asked me to pick a single metric for measuring the progress of civilization, I’d suggest this one: the speed at which a thought becomes reality.

Fire, the wheel, the Renaissance, the industrial revolutions, AI — every new leap in human development has, in essence, pushed that speed up.

You can already see it in simple software: what used to take a whole team can now, in some cases, be done by one person with AI.

But once we hand over a task and get the result back, we suddenly discover how many details we never thought about. The AI filled in the gaps on its own — and almost at random.

So we start clarifying, and run into questions that weren’t part of the original idea at all. Which is why, when people say AI is making us dumber, I’m ready to argue. The flood of options, the blind spots it lights up, the unusual scenarios, the missed details, the edge cases, plus the need to choose many times faster than before — all of this loads the head more than ever, not less. More and more often, the bottleneck is the human being and their cognitive bandwidth.

Picture it roughly like this: we walk out into a field and say, “I want to build a power plant here” — and thousands of robots get to work. But without a million clarifications, we might end up with a hydroelectric dam in the middle of a desert. Technically, the wish was granted. And once ideas like that start taking shape in the physical world, we can’t just delete the consequences from the chat history. The cost of a mistake grows with the scale.

Inside ourselves, by the way, we’ve long known how to create entire worlds. We see them in dreams; we build out images as we read books. Technology is increasingly helping us give our thoughts a material form, and I’m curious where this road will take us. Speed isn’t the only thing that matters — quality does too, or we end up with AI slop: a stream of low-grade, thoughtless content churned out by neural networks. We often talk about clean speech and well-structured writing, but less often, it seems, about clarity of thought. And that clarity can be trained — for example, by trying to picture a mental image as sharply as possible and hold it in our attention.

What if this is God’s plan? If we are made in His image and likeness, perhaps one day we are meant to learn to create by the power of thought alone. The time between a thought and its realization would shrink to zero. What if the path to enlightenment that different religions describe is somehow tied to this ability? Before all of this starts materializing around us, we’ll need to learn to understand what’s happening in our own minds.

Awareness becomes our channel of communication. Through it, we learn to notice our own thoughts and give them a clear shape.

And here a gap may open up: outside, an abundance of tools; inside, possibly emptiness — especially if AI also takes over most of the work we’re used to doing. A society growing ever more fragmented, where everyone sits inside their own gadget, and a growing drift toward introversion are pushing people further into themselves. Perhaps then we’ll turn more often to what truly captivates us, and meaning and purpose will matter more than ever before.

Here’s to finding the time and the will to look within. The future of humanity, it seems, lies in knowing our inner world — which, in turn, shapes the outer one! 😎