I recognise many of these as being relatively platitudal takes that I see on social media. Yet, being a software person and a Hacker News addict, I think that there’s an interesting item for us technicals to consider: We are able to assess risk from a completely different perspective which results in forecasts that are a lot more overstated than what non-technicals think. With most of these, it’s easy to recognise what the gaps in their assumptions are, but their gaps may be leading us in the extremes of the opposite, whereas the truth is somewhere in the middle.
To be more precise, #7 has made waves in technical crowds, establishing itself as a certain ‘proof’ for our most major anxieties about the fragility of digital infrastructure. This has truly scared a lot of people when they first went through the reporting, but seeing through it in more depth, perhaps a better take is that we are very well capable of building infrastructure that could withstand it all.
I just got onboard the train to Prague from Vienna, with a 70-minute delay. My Eurail experiences remain forever cursed.
Before boarding, I had picked up a pack of hemp cigarettes to try out, basically a pre-rolled CBD joint, nothing much interesting to it. As I was sitting down at the far end of the platform smoking it, a man came up looking for bottles to pick up for the deposit to cash in. We chatted a bit, and I learned about his past and about how the deposit in Austria is 25 cents per bottle, as opposed to 15 in the Netherlands, and in Slovakia, where he’s from.
We chatted quite a while. I think he wasn’t really looking for much besides company. He was pretty uninterested in my offer to buy him some food, though considerately pleased by it. He’d had a rough life, having emigrated away from Slovakia when he was around 19 or so. He said he’d been to the UK and had a couple of kids called T… and B… (tattooed on his right arm). For some unexplained reason he left the UK; he didn’t really give me a straight answer besides having had to come back to Slovakia and not really being able to go back (Brexit?). I gave him a couple of puffs of my joint and we talked a bit more. He talked about the cars he used to have, the money troubles he’s going through in Austria, how his ID card got stolen, and how he doesn’t have a phone, so he’s really struggling to navigate. He’d actually opened the conversation asking about a labour bureau where he could find work. He needed a contract to be able to find a place to stay and get his life back together. There always seem to be opportunities to scavenge for clothes or gear, but in the end, without a stable place to work, or an apartment to stay in, it’s pretty much impossible to get anything back together.
We related over having been homeless, the struggles of emigrating away from home, how it feels to be in the company of other people’s families, girlfriends, and more. He seemed like a good guy. He didn’t seem to have much of a goal besides getting his life back in order. At some point I decided to give him the 100 euros I had lying in my wallet in cash. He didn’t really look at the note clearly, probably thought it was a 10 or a 20. He’d been talking about how he needed to sort out a replacement for his ID card, and how that costs a lot: paying someone to drive him back to Slovakia, the gas, the replacement itself. I don’t know. I complain about the simplest garbage, and then feel sad about children in Africa or climate change or whatever, and in the meantime this guy’s lost his kids, his mother’s apartment was seized because she’s addicted to sleeping pills and chugs them down with alcohol, and his brother’s in jail or something. I really don’t know.
Yes, there’s hell everywhere. I don’t know who lives in it, why they ended up there, whether by choice or by mistake. I got another post in the newsletter, FAQ: Isn’t AGI coming too soon for reprogenetics to help?. It’s strange living in all of these worlds at the same time. One where the solutions are going to be found inside masterfully crafted simulations searching for cures to the most challenging diseases, and then, during the day, seeing not only the hells of the masses (x-risk, climate change, famines, screwworms…) but also the hells of individuals.
I was about to head to my train when he excused himself, gave me a fist-bump, and started walking away. My train got delayed again. I looked off into the distance. His posture had changed, he was waving his arms, excited. I think he’d realised it was a hundred euros.
I have to get more serious about how I live. For all the privileges I’ve been given, I should both cry at my mistakes and try harder to be better. That’s the only way I’ll end up somewhere different at 34. Five years to lose all my hair, so I’ve got to get steady and never take anything for granted. Got to find ways to make a difference for the macro and the micro both.