I feel a strong desire to inform my five fans as to my whereabouts in the previous months.
However, since the semester is not yet over, this will not be a comprehensive story. After the mess that was last year, I’ve decided I have to rigidly schedule my moments for existential reflection, and I have that booked out for the second Sunday of each month. So, here are some thoughts at the top of my mind. Think of it like a shout yelled from the window of a car while at a red light: I’m not sure when it will end, and I didn’t really have time to compose my thoughts beforehand.
I look around and the world is moving faster than I have ever seen in my young life. AGI is right around the corner and things are going to get weird fast. There’s a group of people I interact with who believe humanity has, as a median estimate, only about four more years before transformative AI either kills us all or delivers us utopia. What if they’re right?
If they’re right, how should I spend the next four years?
My gut reaction is that I need to cut the fat from my life. But this a pretty cliche thing to say when asked about how to spend any amount of time.
The real pressing question on my mind is: do I spend the next four years trying to save the world or taking advantage of everything it has to offer? I could grind my ass off and get to the point where I could leave my mark, contributing to this technology in a meaningful way. Or, I could neglect my responsibilities and see what kind of lifestyle pure hedonism could carve out for me. My guess is that it would look like a grateful dead groupie.
This dilemma is part of an even greater philosophical conundrum I’ve been thinking about for some time. The great unanswered question, of whether you are in total ownership over your own life, or if you are simply riding the waves of fate.
The 18th-century French mathematician, Pierre Laplace, had this thought experiment around free will and determinism. Imagine if you had a demon that was so powerful and so superintelligent and advanced, and so perceptive that it could perceive the entire universe all at once … If it could truly observe everything in the universe and reason at an advanced enough level—is it the case that such a being would be able to hypothetically derive everything that’s going to happen from now until the end of history in a single gigantic equation? His point being, if such a being could even hypothetically exist, doesn’t that definitionally mean that free will is not real?
It’s a genuine fear of mine that I’m not in control of my life. And I’m quite concerned that I’m doing what I was conditioned to do when I was 7 years old. I mean, If you grew up reading dune and loving technology, can you really do anything except build godlike artificial intelligence while feeling superior? No. You probably just have to do it.
But even if my choices are constrained—by biology, by upbringing, by cultural conditioning—I am still the one making them.
In a very real sense, I am done with the excuses that fate provides. The “everything happens for a reason” crowd. I no longer subscribe to that. There may be threads of destiny woven into our lives, but destiny is less about a preordained path and more about how you navigate the winds that come your way. As someone who is ardent about free will, I accept that the responsibility is mine. I refuse to let myself off the hook—no more unearned forgiveness, no more seeking comfort in the idea that everything is in God’s hands.
We’ll come to see in the era of AI that intelligence and resources were never the bottleneck we thought them to be; it was always agency. One of the great things about technology is that it leverages agency. Every click has consequences. A kid from the middle of nowhere has every tool at his disposal to create the life of his dreams.
You can climb the crevasse-covered mountain you’re completely unprepared to climb. You can attempt to hitch hike the two hours back to Phoenix rather than paying for the shuttle. You can jump in the ocean in January. These are the small, trivial moments that matter. While nonimportant on the surface, choosing to do these things reinforces the idea that you are indeed free and sets you on a course to make more consequential decisions. If these moments ever present themselves to you, you must act. Because in a very meaningful and profound way, you can just do things. And you only learn that lesson by jumping into the ocean in the middle of January.
So here’s where I’m at: I’m all in for the next four years. All in on the belief that my choices matter. All in on the idea that the next four years will be transformational. Because even if “they” are wrong, and the world doesn’t end, and I have decades left to live, I’ll have given myself one hell of a start to my twenties.