THE POSSIBILITY WINDOW IS WIDE OPEN
A PERSONAL CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE WITH A LIMITING LEADER
1989, I was 5.
I can remember it as clearer than a coat of shellac… I was sitting in my uncle’s TV room with a comic book spread in me hands. It was X-Men, featuring Cable (Cyclops’s son… sent back from the distant future… it’s a long story). Cable just so happens to have the most sick, wicked and nasty bionic arm I’ve ever laid eyes on (eat your heart out, Bucky / Winter Soldier).
My aunt asked me about what I was reading. I so viscerally remember saying, all noetic serious like, “One day we’re gonna want to lose our real arms so we can get robot ones.”
She laughed! Not mean. Just that gentle, adult laugh in an attempt to placate. It was like an auditory tap on my little head.
She said to my mother, “Oh, the hope of children…” She then turned her attention to me and dropped the bomb, “Honey… that’s ridiculous.”
I still FEEL her response chopping me down. Okay, maybe not CHOPPED, but I experienced a quiet, internal shift towards “Don’t dream toooooo much, kid. That’s silly movie / comic stuff! Keep your thoughts in reality.”
And… honestly… she had a point.
This was 1989, and what I said was most absolutely ridiculous for that moment and the foreseeable future. Go ahead and web-search some images of prosthetics from the 80s! Terry Fox probably wasn’t loving having to run on that dud, and I bet acrotomophilia wasn’t as rampant as it is now!!!
Vavavooooom!
My aunt couldn’t see the neon from the beige plastic.
THE IDEA LANDSCAPE NOW
Fast-forward to right now. People are already getting voluntary implants: Neural interfaces. Prosthetics that feel more alive than the limbs they replaced and interface with our phones. We’re no longer arguing about whether it will happen… we’re arguing about how fast and who gets access first.
In your face, my aunt!
Now, we aren’t exactly lining up at the butcher shop to have our arms lopped off via cleaver! Therefore, my 1989 claim isn’t toooootally true, BUT, that filter, the one that used to automatically label big, crazy, future-tech ideas as “ridiculous” or “science-fiction”, is completely gone.
Think about it: If in 2026, I said my claim from 1989, “People will want their arms removed for crazy bionic ones in the future,” you’d be all like… yeah.
This is a cultural shift.
The limiting filter of yore has disappeared, BUT not because of the physical tech we have… *GASP* quite the opposite… the antiquated filter disappeared because a magic brain, called AI, showed up and started making the previously impossible FEEL routine.
Feel? How very human.
FILTER SWAP! FROM OLD TO NEW
Cure cancer in our lifetime? (1974 lens)
“Yeah, right!” *EYE-ROLL*
Pause aging? (2003 lens)
“You cute. Not a chance.”
Digital toilets that thoroughly clean one’s anus? (1952 lens)
“Put the comic book down and wipe your own ass!”
These were the default settings in everyone’s brains (including very very smart ones). Society had a cognitive governor installed by way of skeptical dismissal dressed up as realism.
This is where the Adjacent Possible theory becomes useful:
BAI (Before AI), human progress (both evolutionary biology and technological innovation) mostly worked like walking through an ever-expanding house. You’re in one room. From there, you can only clearly see and move into the adjacent room. Therefore, the room 2 away from your current position is blurry or even invisible until you get next to it. That’s why ideas like “cure cancer in our lifetime” or “pause aging” used to get automatic eye-rolls. Not because people were old-timey, small-minded, but because from the room we were standing in, we couldn’t see the distant room with the prize! The concepts were completely abstract.
AI remodelled the Expanding House.
Forget that it helps us move between rooms faster; this is a given, as AI is a thought force multiplier. Obvi. The important part is that AI has made our perpetual current room interface with every room beyond our view all at once. Whoa. Wait- What? Because AI is now a (near) universal ingredient in (almost) every ambitious human project going forward! Therefore, even if we don’t know a single ingredient in room 238 away from us, we can already say with ridiculously high confidence: AI will be in there.
This goes for ANY innovation.
That’s the REAL shift.
This is the mechanism behind a Possibility Renaissance.
“THE POSSIBILITY WINDOW”
This shift has a shape (say that 5 times fast). I’ve been thinking of it as THE POSSIBILITY WINDOW: The range of ideas that feel realistically achievable to a person or a culture at any given time.
It works a bit like the Overton Window (an ever-shifting scope of what society considers politically acceptable), except this one tracks what we consider technologically and scientifically plausible.
The Possibility Window
When I was a kid, most ambitious future ideas lived in Levels 1 or 2 on this scale. They felt like science fiction or straight-up fantasy. My aunt’s reaction to my desirable bionic arm idea was completely normal for 1989; the concept wasn’t even worth taking seriously.
AI has shifted the window.
Ideas that once sat comfortably in “Sci-Fi” territory have jumped multiple levels in just a few years. What used to require “How the hell would we even begin?” now often only requires “Okay… We know we have AI, and we know that AI will be in the final stage, so how do we steer this responsibly?”
And, the Possibility Window shifts ever more.
NOTE: DON’T GET TOO COMFORTABLE!
A catastrophic event (asteroid hit / coronal mass ejection / magnetar… etc.), especially those capable of erasing our tech in one fell swoop, would send us cascading back to Level 1 in a damn HURRY!!!
“How do we harness a lightning bolt?” AGAIN!
Don’t look a gift possibility horse in the mouth!!!
THIS IS NERD SCIENCE PROJECT STUFF! NOPE.
AI’s ongoing granting humanity universal enlightenment isn’t the chatbots or the image generators (although I have gotten a real kick out of being able to see Jesus doing a kickflip!).
He hath risen… to shred!!!
The real enlightenment sending shockwaves is that AI has removed the psychological speed bump that used to kill big ideas… and more importantly, self-esteem and interpersonal relationships.
Before AI, the Possibility Window was narrow:
We used to self-censor at the idea stage. This is self-limiting!
We used to censor others at the idea stage. This is poor relationship hygiene!
The Possibility Window has expanded: Everything is doable… It’s just WHEN?
No longer are our ideas, or the ideas of others, to be caged based on tech limitations; the only limiting factor now is time. And… the best part… time is a neutral variable… (Between people… time can absolutely be a combatant, depending on where the person is in the timeline of their lives)
The old filter protected us from inwardly feeling shameful and/or outwardly looking stupid.
The new reality requires us to risk looking stupid on purpose, because the cost of being wrong about what’s possible just dropped through the basement. So, forget the nerdy, sciencey, technological progress. We’ve achieved both self and social cognitive liberation!
No need to self-censor. Dare to dream!
No need to censor others. Dare others to dream!
God… I sound like a freakin’ lame ass motivational speaker in a high school gym.
I guess they were onto something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know I’m excited!
COGNITIVE DEBT? MORE LIKE COGNITIVE CREDIT!
MIT recently released a study suggesting that “cognitive debt” is very very real: If we outsource too much thinking, our brains will atrophy. “Use it or lose it” is still true for neuroplasticity.
Yes.
But… I think we’re framing it wrong.
What if this MIT data is instead suggesting that AI is giving us COGNITIVE CREDIT?
What if offloading the repetitive, the rote, even the “brainstorming” parts of thinking actually FREES UP horsepower for the parts that matter most: creativity, synthesis, wild connection-making, emotion, questions brewed from a painful human existence???
Remember that neuroplasticity doesn’t just work in one direction! When you remove certain cognitive loads, the brain doesn’t necessarily get weaker. It can get rewired toward higher-order work if you choose to use it that way.
(For hard proof, check out the very sad study on cutting off monkey fingers… for an interesting hypothesis, check out why we “SEE” when we dream.)
The people who will thrive in this era (and those to come) aren’t the ones who treat AI like a replacement for thinking. The thrivers are the ones who treat AI like the ultimate creative collaborator. The peeps who designate AI to “TOOL” status. The tool that handles the heavy (and annoying) lifting so that the human can spend more time… human-ing.
The danger isn’t the tool.
The danger is using the tool to become more comfortable instead of more ambitious.
This will synaptically rewire our brains for all new possibilities!!!
Reframe. Flip the fucking script… even if the brilliant MIT folks say otherwise.
YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Every rose has its thorns:
This new atmosphere of a gaping Possibility Window is not automatic. It’s available, to all even, but it’s not guaranteed.
We have agency after all: You are welcome to use AI to make yourself lazier, more passive, more addicted to easy answers and low-friction comfort… actually sounds pretty sweet. *SLAPS SELF* Sadly, plenty of people will go for this, AND the tech is perfectly happy to help you obtain certified veg status.
OR… Hear me out…
You can tap into the human need for friction, ambition, and aiming UP by making this tool your bitch to become the most creatively dangerous, idea-hungry version of yourself that has ever existed! THESE are the people who are leaning way into “EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE”.
The folks who will look back on this era as a golden age of human flourishing (a genuine tech and cognitive enlightenment) are the ones who treat the removal of the old filter (“we are limited”) as a personal responsibility, not just a technological gift.
Yes, the old limits dissolved faster than we were ready for… I’m human, I hear ya. But LEAN IN, because now the only real limit left is the one between what you can imagine… and what you’re willing to ruthlessly chase.
Level up.
And don’t just aim to step into the room next to your ambition.
Let’s fucking aim 463 rooms away.
So why settle for Cable’s bionic arm?
Dare to dream, my aunt.
Fin.