“When you were partying, I studied the blade. When you were having premarital sex, I mastered the blockchain. While you wasted your days at the gym in pursuit of vanity, I cultivated inner strength. And now that the world is on fire and the barbarians at the gate, you have the audacity to come to me for help?”
I would encourage you to test your assumptions about others’ capacity for interiority, fear, hope, paralysis, confusion, commitment, and so on, compared with your own. In your resignation—“humanity is a failure,” “others don’t care,” “their ignorance, apathy, and meanness”—I think you make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse: you have separated yourself from others, derided them, and now (incorrectly, imo) complain they don’t care about what you care about.
Are you sure this resignation, veiled as a knowing sorrow, is justified? Are you sure that your enemy is really ‘other people’? Those ‘other people’ who vocally express widespread fear about AI capabilities, or oppose datacenter construction (however misguided)? That ‘they’ are simply ‘doing nothing’? That your enemy might not instead be those in power, those with control, those who regulate—with whom you actually align yourself here?
Put simply, are you sure that you are not just projecting your own defeatism onto the world at large?
I would encourage you to test your assumptions about others’ capacity for interiority, fear, hope, paralysis, confusion, commitment, and so on, compared with your own. In your resignation—“humanity is a failure,” “others don’t care,” “their ignorance, apathy, and meanness”—I think you make the mistake of putting the cart before the horse: you have separated yourself from others, derided them, and now (incorrectly, imo) complain they don’t care about what you care about.
Are you sure this resignation, veiled as a knowing sorrow, is justified? Are you sure that your enemy is really ‘other people’? Those ‘other people’ who vocally express widespread fear about AI capabilities, or oppose datacenter construction (however misguided)? That ‘they’ are simply ‘doing nothing’? That your enemy might not instead be those in power, those with control, those who regulate—with whom you actually align yourself here?
Put simply, are you sure that you are not just projecting your own defeatism onto the world at large?
Obviously, I am a part of the failure.