CONCEPT
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Maslow's phrase for the highest capacities of human beings — the peaks of wonder, meaning, and transcendence — precisely what AI cannot replicate and therefore what must be cultivated with the greatest care.
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature is the title of Maslow's posthumously published 1971 book and the name he gave to what lies above self-actualization — the capacities for transcendence, peak experience, the perception of B-values, and the questions that no creature before Homo sapiens could ask. The Maslow simulation returns to this phrase as the answer to the twelve-year-old's question, 'What am I for?' She is for the farther reaches — for the wondering, for the questions machines cannot originate, for the irreducible human capacity to look at a world full of answers and ask whether the right questions are being asked.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Maslow spent the last decade of his life studying what he called the transpersonal dimensions of human nature — the capacities that go beyond ordinary self-actualization into territory that had traditionally been the province of religion and mysticism. He resisted