Forgive my profane take on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, but this great concept can prove even better with some reshaping.
The shape of a pyramid is good for highlighting the order of importance of these layers. With the basic needs at the bottom, you can easily imagine the whole construct collapsing if any basic needs fail to be met. So far, so good. However, in reality, these needs multiply from bottom to top, more like a tree, with a single, most crucial need at the bottom: “staying alive”. A few other essential needs follow it, but some needs from the pyramid’s higher layers seem even more important than a few basic needs. Altruism, for example, would never happen if social needs were always less important than basic needs. This is what the pyramid shape can’t illustrate well enough.
I started thinking about this hierarchy because it would benefit us to create a decision matrix for evaluating things more objectively and comparably. This can later be used to assess situations, governments, and companies (virtually anything) in a more human-centric way and can even be used to enhance AI with humanistic goals. Today, most AI is trained to fulfill its creator’s needs — i.e., to make more profit — which can be disastrous for the human race one day.
The other reason is to grasp better how human thinking works. Evolution has slowly crafted human thinking to continuously monitor the environment for potential threats and evaluate them in the order of their importance. Those individuals whose order of importance wasn’t set up correctly were gradually selected. Therefore, human thinking should incorporate this decision matrix to defend our needs. Naturally, thinking is much more than this, but at the heart, at the very beginning of the thinking process, there must be such an evaluation to happen. A proper model could help us understand human behavior and facilitate building better societies.
Let’s see what are our needs:
- Staying alive – keep body integrity – avoid physical harm; sharp, pointy, fast-moving objects or dangerous animals
- Air supply – get out of the water, get rid of suffocating circumstances, adversaries
- Avoid harsh environments and physical pain: too hot, too loud, too cold, too weary on the body
- Safety of your child or spouse
- Sexual self-determination
- Dignity
- Avoid thirst
- Avoid exhaustion
- Avoid hunger
- Caring (over your child or relatives)
- Health
- Safe shelter
- Healthy food/drink
- Enjoying sex
- Being part of the community: feeling of accomplishment, being forgiven, freedom of being different
- Community experience: team sport, dance, theater, cathartic events
- Prestige
- Sense of control
- Flow, creativity
- Wisdom
Originally I’ve sketched a tree, but realized it resembles an ice cream better. Then came my daughter, who thought the same it seems, and drew a cone below my scribble. Much funnier, isn’t it? :)
Our brains are wired to act to the most imminent dangers; the higher the threat on the list, the sooner; however, everybody has the decision tree slightly differently wired. Therefore, the order of the list above is unique to everyone.
There are different levels of the same need. Think of hunger, for example. Initially, you don’t care about it, but it might quickly jump to the top of the list over time. I should have used longer stripes instead of a spot (as shown above).
We can also consider the long-run outcomes, represented as the “safety” of a given need’s supply. If you “feel safe”, you expect your needs to be satisfied in the long run (even if they’re not met at the moment).
How are our brains wired?
The part of our brains processing the sensory input resembles the root of a tree. Then, it narrows down to a thin path — like the trunk of a tree — where the brain decides if the current scenario needs an immediate reaction. Even the most harmless conversation goes through this check continuously. If the processing continues, the brain checks for more threats, and if every check has passed, it can engage in rational or creative thinking. (This is what politicians know well and manipulate the masses with made-up dangers to derail the rational conversation.)
The better our needs are generally satisfied, the higher the thinking process can go. Even if our slightest need is left unsatisfied, it’s hard to maintain a flow of rational thinking. There was an experiment, for example, to test how hunger affects judges’ verdicts, and it turned out that the most severe judgments (on made-up cases) were born before lunch. They call this phenomenon “Ego power”, the power which keeps up our social behavior and stops us from instinctive, violent reactions. Once this power gets depleted, we can’t keep up our social self.
Once a particular domain is fully satisfied, we can enjoy the fullness, and we feel safe:
- Wellness (hedonism)
- Fitness (sport, flow from physical activity)
- Being loved, respected
- Being part of a larger entity, purposefulness
- Spontaneity, enlightenment
By the way, we don’t always need all our lower-level needs to be satisfied to reach a higher level. Buddhism, for example, teaches people to suppress their desires to reach a higher level of consciousness. (All religions do this at some level.) Our evaluation matrix shows the signs of neuroplasticity so that it can adapt to unsatisfying environments to a degree, but we can’t suppress most of our needs completely. “I am a human, after all.”
Being part of a community also requires suppressing some of our needs. Still, when a community collapses, nature takes care of survival by saving people by putting their basic needs upfront. These layers ensure the survival of humankind. In hard times, when resources are low, humans can only pay attention to their basic needs and are often hostile to each other, which results in the survival of the most assertive few. When resources are plenty we can universally fulfill higher levels of needs (for the masses), and be friendly or even liberal towards each other. This is how great civilizations form. (And fall when resources run short.)
How the model can be created and fine-tuned?
As a first step, we could create a model based on our experience. We could then develop psychological tests to measure the “importance” (or threat) of different inputs, reaction time, and intensity. Questionnaires could further improve our understanding of how these needs compare. Once we get enough input, we could create an AI to learn these human needs and compare its reactions to humans’ to facilitate deep learning.
Finally, a simple AI is not enough, we have to compute the needs of the masses ⇾ the whole of humanity ⇾ the whole ecosystem (with all the living creatures involved). It only takes some computational power. 😉
I wonder where this could end. Is it possible to create sentient robots? Or even a moral AI? One that could compute what’s good for humanity better than our brightest minds?
In my other post – Changing the Consumption Game – I wrote about a so-called “Future index,” which could be the bread and butter of a new economic model to overcome profit-oriented capitalism. I expect this “moral AI” could be essential to that model.