The human struggle to find purpose is a problem of incidentally very weak integration or dialog between reason and the rest of the brain, and self-delusional but mostly adaptive masking of one’s purpose for political positioning. I doubt there’s anything fundamentally intractable about it. If we can get the machines to want to carry our purposes, I think they’ll figure it out just fine.
Also… you can get philosophical about it, but the reality is, there are happy people, their purpose to them is clear, to create a beautiful life for themselves and their loved ones. The people you see at neurips are more likely to be the kind of hungry, high-achieving professionals who are not happy in that way, and perhaps don’t want to be. So maybe you’re diagnosing a legitimately enduring collective issue (the sorts of humans who end up on top tend to be the ones who are capable of divorcing their actions from a direct sense of purpose, or the types of people who are pathologically busy and who lose sight of the point of it all or never have the chance to cultivate a sense for it in the first place). It may not be human nature, but it could be humanity nature. Sure.
But that’s still a problem that can be solved by having more intelligence. If you can find a way to manufacture more intelligence per human than the human baseline, that’s going to be a pretty good approach to it.
You raise a good point: sometimes relentlessly pursuing a single, rigid “point of it all” can end up more misguided than having no formal point at all. In my more optimistic moments, I see a parallel in how scientific inquiry unfolds.
What keeps me from sliding into pure nihilism is the notion that we can hold meaning lightly but still genuinely. We don’t have to decide on a cosmic teleology to care deeply about each other, or to cherish the possibility of building a better future—especially now, as AI’s acceleration broadens our horizons and our worries. Perhaps the real “point” is to keep exploring, keep caring, and keep staying flexible in how we define what we’re doing here.
Any point that you can sloganize and wave around on a picket sign is not the true point, but that’s not because the point is fundamentally inarticulable, it just requires more than one picket sign to locate it. Perhaps ten could do it.
The human struggle to find purpose is a problem of incidentally very weak integration or dialog between reason and the rest of the brain, and self-delusional but mostly adaptive masking of one’s purpose for political positioning. I doubt there’s anything fundamentally intractable about it. If we can get the machines to want to carry our purposes, I think they’ll figure it out just fine.
Also… you can get philosophical about it, but the reality is, there are happy people, their purpose to them is clear, to create a beautiful life for themselves and their loved ones. The people you see at neurips are more likely to be the kind of hungry, high-achieving professionals who are not happy in that way, and perhaps don’t want to be. So maybe you’re diagnosing a legitimately enduring collective issue (the sorts of humans who end up on top tend to be the ones who are capable of divorcing their actions from a direct sense of purpose, or the types of people who are pathologically busy and who lose sight of the point of it all or never have the chance to cultivate a sense for it in the first place). It may not be human nature, but it could be humanity nature. Sure.
But that’s still a problem that can be solved by having more intelligence. If you can find a way to manufacture more intelligence per human than the human baseline, that’s going to be a pretty good approach to it.
Pursuing some specific “point of it all” can be much more misguided.
You raise a good point: sometimes relentlessly pursuing a single, rigid “point of it all” can end up more misguided than having no formal point at all. In my more optimistic moments, I see a parallel in how scientific inquiry unfolds.
What keeps me from sliding into pure nihilism is the notion that we can hold meaning lightly but still genuinely. We don’t have to decide on a cosmic teleology to care deeply about each other, or to cherish the possibility of building a better future—especially now, as AI’s acceleration broadens our horizons and our worries. Perhaps the real “point” is to keep exploring, keep caring, and keep staying flexible in how we define what we’re doing here.
Any point that you can sloganize and wave around on a picket sign is not the true point, but that’s not because the point is fundamentally inarticulable, it just requires more than one picket sign to locate it. Perhaps ten could do it.