I wanted to make the future good, not save it

Today, I drove to Brussels airport to pick up Celeste 🌱. On the way back, we had an interesting discussion about whether living through the potential end times and working on AI Safety is the best life I could have hoped for, and what is the future I would have wanted absent the pressure of catastrophic risk. This is an edited voice note I left to myself after this conversation.

Before realizing the world may be at risk of ending, what was driving me were the trans-humanist ideals. I was raised on a diet of science fiction books and I had this vision of the bright future of humanity. I hoped that one day we would get rid of death, spread throughout the galaxy, and solve all the problems that have been plaguing humanity since its beginning. I did expect this to be fucking hard and to be taking a long time, but I felt like at least the world was already in a stable place, and on its way towards becoming better.

I knew there were many large issues, for example climate change, that were coming up ahead and humanity was not prepared to handle them. But I still expected that my life would overall be pretty good no matter what I did. Working on important stuff would be the thing I would do because it is the most meaningful work I could do, because it is what makes my life good, because I want the future to be good.

This was what was driving me when I was working in crypto. I believe in the ideals of blockchains, in decentralization, in giving power to individuals and upgrading our financial systems. I believed in the potential of blockchains to become a general way of changing any incentives landscape to solve tragedies of the commons in a decentralized way. I was contributing to making a good future. I was working on something I was good at, with interesting puzzles, interesting technologies. I felt like I was making a contribution.

There are many more fields like this I would have liked to work on, be it biotech to solve aging and get rid of diseases, cryptography, energy production, institutional improvements, aeronautics.

SpaceX is one example of a company which is trying to develop one of the necessary parts of the good future for humanity. Another is DeepMind, who’s doing the same but for biotechnology. Or Pol.is and other civil society organizations for improving democracy and societal adequacy. I believe in the potential of all of them to usher in a much better world, a world I would much prefer living in, all attacking one part of this giant problem. In those companies, I could work on making the future better than its baseline trajectory.

I imagined my baseline future to already be pretty good. As a middle-class French tech worker, I trusted that my material needs would always be met, that I would be mostly free from suffering, that I would find good relationship and have partners that I could build a happy life with. In this life, I would work on those important problems because they’re meaningful, because meaningful work is part of living the good life.

I would have paid the cost of the good future coming a bit later, so that I could spend less time on work and have more time to live a good life right now. I trusted that, while important, those problems were not urgent, and delays were OK.

That was how I expected my life to go. That was the dream I pursued for years.

Then I got convinced that AGI could come soon, and cause the destruction of everyone and everything I care about.

AI Safety is much less pleasant to work on because it’s a negative goal. Extinction is something to avoid, something that could destroy the future I expected to have, rather than making the world better.

AI risk also has a deadline. We need to either pause of solve alignment before a superintelligence is deployed.

Given the stakes, I could not bear to not work as hard as I can, to not try to give us the best chances. I am ready to sacrifice a lot of what I care about for additional impact on this. But this leads me to a life that much less good: a life with much more work, much more stakes, much more fear, and much less building my little shard of utopia around me.

Although, working on AI safety is meaningful. It’s possibly the most meaningful work I could have. I like that it matters just so much. I like the aesthetic of giving it my all. I like that I’ll get to see the end times, and possibly get thrown into the trans-humanist uploaded utopia and live forever.

But this was not what I wanted from life.