Man, I feel so many ways about this. I wrote something very similar at around the same time, although with a different theme (near future spec fic) and a different crux (the main problems I saw were climate change, disinformation, political disintegration). It even has the same proto-EA-like organisations trying to Do Something, but failing. I never finished the story because I couldn’t give it a satisfying ending, my next story involved using magic to solve things. By then I’d found out about AI safety and I had a whole new set of groaning thoughts.
In fact reading this post reminds me of the predominant vibe I felt when I was doing my English Literature degree. Lots of people in the humanities have these intuitions about Moloch and capital and AI and acceleration. They sense that something is deeply wrong, wrong in the way that X-Risk is a wronging of the world, but there is no language where these feelings can be expressed except despair and gloom and invocations of monsters. At least with AI technical/CS people can try to make steps towards understanding what’s going on. The rest of us are just onlookers while a few billionaires, tech companies, and the systems that produced them determine our fate.
Somehow these days I’ve managed to chill out a little. It’s a very strange state I’m in but the source of the chill resembles something like a post-trip state, even though I have never taken any in my life that kind of explanation vibes with me. The process of getting there involved a lot of crushing despair and deep rumination. I’m not sure how I got here and I’m not sure if it’ll last. But I hope you can find some moments of peace as well. We are all of us waiting under the looming shadow of our future. Be not afraid.
Man, I feel so many ways about this. I wrote something very similar at around the same time, although with a different theme (near future spec fic) and a different crux (the main problems I saw were climate change, disinformation, political disintegration). It even has the same proto-EA-like organisations trying to Do Something, but failing. I never finished the story because I couldn’t give it a satisfying ending, my next story involved using magic to solve things. By then I’d found out about AI safety and I had a whole new set of groaning thoughts.
In fact reading this post reminds me of the predominant vibe I felt when I was doing my English Literature degree. Lots of people in the humanities have these intuitions about Moloch and capital and AI and acceleration. They sense that something is deeply wrong, wrong in the way that X-Risk is a wronging of the world, but there is no language where these feelings can be expressed except despair and gloom and invocations of monsters. At least with AI technical/CS people can try to make steps towards understanding what’s going on. The rest of us are just onlookers while a few billionaires, tech companies, and the systems that produced them determine our fate.
Somehow these days I’ve managed to chill out a little. It’s a very strange state I’m in but the source of the chill resembles something like a post-trip state, even though I have never taken any in my life that kind of explanation vibes with me. The process of getting there involved a lot of crushing despair and deep rumination. I’m not sure how I got here and I’m not sure if it’ll last. But I hope you can find some moments of peace as well. We are all of us waiting under the looming shadow of our future. Be not afraid.