I have been working under the assumption that ASI was guaranteed by 2030 since 2015. I’m currently spending my life as though only people thinking like me can decide whether the world will end, under the assumption that the three main threats capable of guaranteeing humanity loses are 1. climate change acceleration before tech to stop it can get approval to be deployed, 2. trump win 2024, 3. ASI win 2024-2030, 4. economic instability as a result of the previous items.
Anything fun I do is at all times at risk of being considered a distraction. I have been depressed for at least 15 years, maybe even as many as 18 years, at least half my life, long before any AI stuff was forefront of my thinking, because I have fairly intense ADHD; I haven’t super gotten out of it but I do better and worse. AI certainly hasn’t helped a ton, but I’ve done some fairly high risk things to try to make a difference, so far the main big risk was unambiguously net negative for the world and I wish I could undo it (I get unwanted praise from accelerationists when I say what it is, but it isn’t that hard to figure it out). Now I’m just building up relevant skills I’d been delaying too long, in the hope that I can build up to something that can make a difference in time. I also spend a fair amount of time trying to organize and index stuff I find online, because in my opinion a major bottleneck for prosocial folks is that information indexing is hard and there aren’t good ways to browse the internet.
I live a very pared down life to minimize costs now, so as to reduce my need for further income in order to keep chugging on my research ideas. I don’t spend a lot of time with family and friends; they tend to be frustrated at that, because of my thinking they’ll all be gone in x years, yeah, but I generally think spending time with people is more a waste of time than not in most cases, and I am prone to addiction and find people very addictive, to the point that if I let myself spend time with them they usually end up having to shoo me away to go do the stuff I care about. There are exceptions; I love VRChat with a crowd who’ll talk technical with me. Basically if I can’t talk technical when socializing, I don’t want to do it—even if it’s a distraction from actually doing the technical stuff I’m talking about. Hi, posting on here absolutely counts towards this. (Though that’s been true long before I got obsessed with AI and then AI safety, it’s more of a cause of how I ended up in this crowd than an effect of it.)
Ever since I decided I wanted to aim for life extension I’ve been uninterested in kids until and unless I can guarantee that the global poor get the life extension too. Only once we have a world at least as good as star trek but with much longer life would I consider kids. I consider that a reachable outcome in the next 60 years if AI goes well.
I have been working under the assumption that ASI was guaranteed by 2030 since 2015. I’m currently spending my life as though only people thinking like me can decide whether the world will end, under the assumption that the three main threats capable of guaranteeing humanity loses are 1. climate change acceleration before tech to stop it can get approval to be deployed, 2. trump win 2024, 3. ASI win 2024-2030, 4. economic instability as a result of the previous items.
Anything fun I do is at all times at risk of being considered a distraction. I have been depressed for at least 15 years, maybe even as many as 18 years, at least half my life, long before any AI stuff was forefront of my thinking, because I have fairly intense ADHD; I haven’t super gotten out of it but I do better and worse. AI certainly hasn’t helped a ton, but I’ve done some fairly high risk things to try to make a difference, so far the main big risk was unambiguously net negative for the world and I wish I could undo it (I get unwanted praise from accelerationists when I say what it is, but it isn’t that hard to figure it out). Now I’m just building up relevant skills I’d been delaying too long, in the hope that I can build up to something that can make a difference in time. I also spend a fair amount of time trying to organize and index stuff I find online, because in my opinion a major bottleneck for prosocial folks is that information indexing is hard and there aren’t good ways to browse the internet.
I live a very pared down life to minimize costs now, so as to reduce my need for further income in order to keep chugging on my research ideas. I don’t spend a lot of time with family and friends; they tend to be frustrated at that, because of my thinking they’ll all be gone in x years, yeah, but I generally think spending time with people is more a waste of time than not in most cases, and I am prone to addiction and find people very addictive, to the point that if I let myself spend time with them they usually end up having to shoo me away to go do the stuff I care about. There are exceptions; I love VRChat with a crowd who’ll talk technical with me. Basically if I can’t talk technical when socializing, I don’t want to do it—even if it’s a distraction from actually doing the technical stuff I’m talking about. Hi, posting on here absolutely counts towards this. (Though that’s been true long before I got obsessed with AI and then AI safety, it’s more of a cause of how I ended up in this crowd than an effect of it.)
Ever since I decided I wanted to aim for life extension I’ve been uninterested in kids until and unless I can guarantee that the global poor get the life extension too. Only once we have a world at least as good as star trek but with much longer life would I consider kids. I consider that a reachable outcome in the next 60 years if AI goes well.