Avoiding Collision
I've been fortunate, on rare occasion, to have experienced the murmurations of starlings. Thousands of birds wheeling and folding across the sky, changing course together, at speed, without a single collision. None knowing the whole shape. Each, simply reading its neighbor. So I've wondered for some time now, why can't we?
I'm not happy with the world as it is. I do not believe it reflects what most people, in their hearts, actually want. Some turns feel obvious, and yet we cannot make them. The world feels like it's dying, and most of us are too busy surviving it to play in it. We're short on a way to read one another. We're short on a way to turn.
Every time we've widened the circle of who counts as a someone rather than a something, we've done it late, over the loud objections of the people already standing comfortably inside. Each expansion was obvious only to the ones willing to stand for it, and unthinkable to everyone who held the power to grant it.
We freed people we had owned. We gave the vote to people we decided unfit. Slowly and grudgingly, we agreed that a child laborer and a foreign stranger and a person who prays differently were all, in fact, people. Every one was a fight, every one ended with a generation that came afterward, looking back, confused about how we believed otherwise.
So we're good at this, eventually. Others have traced this pattern before us. In 1869 the historian W.E.H. Lecky described morality as a circle that widens over time; a century later the philosopher Peter Singer gave it its name, the expanding circle: moral concern creeping outward from the self, to family, to tribe, to nation, and past the edge of our own species. The direction has been remarkably consistent; the timing, consistently terrible. We do it by collision: we run headlong into the people we've wronged, they push back, the wrongness finally becomes undeniable, and we adjust. Starlings turn before they hit. We've only ever turned after. And the apology has become our great human pastime.
A circle that widens over time
In 1869 the historian W.E.H. Lecky described morality as a circle that widens over time — from the family, to the nation, to all humanity, and at last to the animal world. A century later Peter Singer argued that reason is the engine of that expansion: once we justify our conduct to others, logic pushes us toward an impartial point of view — until the only place left to stop is the edge of sentience itself. Hover a ring to trace the widening.
What we've never had is the chance to widen the circle before the fight: to move first. This time we can.
We are building minds. Not metaphorically. We're constructing systems that reason, hold a conversation, and model themselves, and getting better at it every year. I am not going to tell you that today's machines are conscious; I do not know, and neither does anyone selling you a confident answer either way. But whether something we've manufactured might one day suffer, or prefer, or be wronged has quietly stopped being science fiction. Unlike every previous expansion, this one is not creeping up from a margin we've chosen to ignore. We're walking toward it with our eyes open.
Could we, this one time, draw the wider circle in advance, and be the generation that arrived early instead of the one that apologized? I believe we can. But believing isn't a plan. So what are the questions we'd have to answer? What are the pieces we'd need?
Sources & credits. Derived from: W.E.H. Lecky, A History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869) · Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1981). Credit to: Craig Reynolds' boids flocking model (1987), which drives the murmuration above. Inspired by: MacKenzie Scott, We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For (2025)