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Ten years ago, I'd have said that the most likely way that I'd die would be of heart disease at 78 years old or the like.
Today? My "normal" death is forty years away! With the speed these models are advancing, and how we are still picking low hanging fruit in several different areas, it seems increasingly unlikely we won't have AGI by then – barring some disaster like a global nuclear apocalypse. Today, I'd say my most likely death is either getting paperclipped, or surviving for thousands of years until I die of some scifi crap I can't even currently imagine.
How should one act in the face of this? I'm not Yudkowsky; what little he can do to affect the course of humanity, I certainly can't do much better. Still, are there not steps one could take to improve one's own lot in case it works out for the better? I'd like to see some sort of "retirement plan for the AI-pilled", common sense stuff you can do to at least hedge for the eventuality. Post-singulary I'll get hopelessly outcompeted in alpha, but maybe there's some beta to be had if you act now? Buying physical items with historical significance, perhaps? I imagine the rich people of the year 3000 would pay a lot for an authentic medieval manuscript, for example.
Invest in public companies likely to do well with AI. There is the BOTZ ETF, obvious plays like Nvidia etc. I wouldn't rely on some things appreciating in value, robots or future ruling classes may not be sentimental
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My goal is to reproduce while maximizing happiness AUC. Maximizing happiness means:
a. The people I love continue to love me back.
b. I get to do cool things for as long as possible
c. The absence of extreme suffering (for me and those I care about).
From there, this is an iterated Pascal's matrix:
a. Either AGI happens within my lifetime or not
b. Either the AGI is "good" or "bad"
c. Either fundamental social contracts (i.e. the concept of "property", murder is rare) break down within my lifetime or not
(A) If AGI does NOT happen within my lifetime and social contracts persist: accumulate a reasonable amount of capital quickly, reproduce, and do what I want to do
(B) If AGI does NOT happen within my lifetime and social contracts collapse: move myself + family somewhere remote, be able to sustain ourselves, and own some guns
(C) If AGI DOES happen, it's GOOD, and social contracts persist:
(D) If AGI DOES happen, it's GOOD, and social contracts collapse:
(E) If AGI DOES happen, it's BAD, and social contracts persist:
Presumably this is a scenario where AGI can do anything it wants to do in the virtual world (e.g. win the stock market), but has limited ability to reach into the physical (e.g. build physical robots to carry out its plans) because the physical world still involves humans coordinating with each other.
Best course of action: move somewhere remote, be able to sustain oneself, and own some guns
(F) If AGI DOES happen, it's BAD, and social contracts collapse:
Taken in total: I think I have a pathway towards generating enough capital (e.g. $10M or so) in the next two years. After that I plan to buy a remote farm and lots of guns, some equity in the major AI companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple), and an apartment in the city (I can travel to / live in for enjoyment if things are going well).
I presume it will take me at least five years to learn how to farm properly. So all in all, this is a reasonable course of action if social contract breakdown is > 10 years away.
I'm assuming for AGI = BAD, that the AGI just doesn't care about us. Society breaks down, supply chain collapses, it builds whatever it wants to build, but we're not actively being hunted down. If it's actively wanting to hunt us down nothing I do will matter -- but in the "farm + guns" plan there's the side-benefit that maybe I can blow my brains out and entropy will make it exceedingly annoying to re-create a virtual version of me to be tortured for all eternity.
Sounds good to me. What would you spend it on?
You already live in Mayfair, how much further can you improve it?
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With $10m cash you can probably buy people to do the farming for you. Hell, I'm trying to save a 1/10th of that for retirement, and would happily be a sharecropper for him.
Maybe if the social contract collapses...
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Funny, this is actually what I find really appealing.
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I thought my plan A was buying Big Tech stonks, but then Putin (and Western authorities) have decided otherwise, and then SBF and company have decided that we're not yet fucked enough and crypto should go to shit too, so, ah... you can still buy stock, hopefully. I hear there's a discount now.
Other than that, the question is whether the transition will be remotely graceful or whether people will just be ejected by the ascended system and its masters. If the latter is probable (which I think it is), one should get real estate in some accessible nowhere, build horizontal networks, stock up on guns, explosives, compute and energy sources... and prepare for negotiations about land ownership and eminent domain.
That's an excessively optimistic way to approach this, of course.
Is there? Maybe compared to a year ago, but otherwise, it doesn't look like it. The price-to-earnings ratio is as high as it was right before Black Tuesday. The only times it has ever been higher were during the dot com bubble, the Covid bubble, and it when it was just over where it is now around 2018, which was really just part of the lead up to currently popping Covid bubble.
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I'm close to that same belief. Even if there's some 'ceiling' on general intelligence that prevents hard takeoff/foom/paperclipping from wiping out our entire solar system or even 'merely' all life on earth, it seems proven that one can create models that are strictly superior to humans in given limited domains. Which is to say the AI will vastly improve our productivity and will solve or help us solve many hard problems in relatively short order, and thus probably allow us to 'fix' aging, energy issues, climate change, or any other X-risk we face other than the risk presented by AGI itself. We'll become a spacefaring species, transhumanism will probably follow shortly thereafter, and if we can figure out how to 'uplift' ourselves in intellect THEN we're really gonna see what this baby can do.
So basically, how does one invest both ones time AND money when faced with possible Armageddon OR likely AI-induced industrial revolution?
I go about my daily life and interact with humans who have ZERO clue about the disruption we're about to experience, and might have a hard time grasping the shape of it even if explained to them, and wonder how they'll adapt to the sea change. I've shown most of my family the current state of machine-generated art, and they are treating it like a novelty and neat toy but showing little curiosity as to how it works or what else it might be able to do.
I've had this weird urge to reach out to certain people I haven't spoken to in a while just to let them know I care in case I never get the chance to talk to them again, and to leave them with the massively cryptic message "take care, everything about our known world is about to get irretrievably weird in the coming months."
It's crazy to think that in most scenarios where we survive, the exponential increase in global GDP per capita will likely obviate any differences in material wellbeing between the poorest people on the planet and the richest.
Entirely possible that someone starting with a net worth of $10 and Elon Musk starting with a net worth of ~$200 billion will both end up within a rounding error's breadth of each other in the grand scheme if the eventual wealth produced is at all 'equally' distributed (I do not assert that to be the case).
That is to say, its almost 'pointless' to try to get ahead of the game, since the difference between you, who has some inkling of the future that is coming down the track and someone who is completely and utterly unaware of said future will probably be unnoticeable once we're actually in that future. So strictly speaking, maybe you even attempting to worry about it is pointless?
With that said, if we consider the near-mid term future and the possibility that AI capabilities plateau, you can probably identify extant companies that will rise to fully dominant positions if their current plays pan out favorably.
For my part, I'm not trying to pick winners and losers, I'm literally just putting my money into an ETF that holds a basket of shares in various companies that are in the automation, machine learning, and robotics industries.
If I were to make an 'all-in' bet at this stage (not advised), I'd go for NVIDIA.
I am experiencing the same thing. Some people think it's kind of cool, but most aren't blown away by it. I think some people just don't get how technically impressive this is. I suspect that when we finally get AGI, people will be no more impressed than they are when exposed to other human beings.
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I have some AGI staked. It's a coin I picked not because I have great confidence in their tech (they're not really at the leading edge of AI, they look more like the GOFAI school of thought with a robot head).
They are at least active and I get the occasional airdrop of something. The reason I picked them is their name. The name is SingularityNet, the ticker is AGI. If there's big AI news, you'd think people would ape in to something that's literally called AGI!
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I think people are lying to themselves because they simply cannot imagine a world where humans can exist without working. And if you believe that (which I do, simply because I see no movement toward my government being willing to allow people to exist without working) then the idea that AI is coming for your job is scary, in fact a threat to your existence. And add in the class snobbery in which people assume that robots are only going to be used to replace those stupid working class people who work with their hands doing menial labor. They think their work is too important and sophisticated for a robot or an AI. It’s a psychological thing where admitting that AI is capable of your job means that that you’ll be just like those old factory workers who they sneered at in the 1990s.
Which western countries support you enough as a student to live without extra income and/or being housed and fed by family?
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And out of those who do work, huge fraction actually works jobs that are totally made up by the government, either directly or by regulatory requirements in things like civil rights, financial law compliance etc.
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Solid choice; shovels, not gold.
ASML and TMSC (mod geopolitical risk) are also up there.
Yep, although I've seen the argument that the current AI models being created are the shovels, and the firms that discover the best uses for them are the gold.
Still, don't think the demand for GPUs will decrease anytime soon no siree.
I'm pretty ignorant about this whole sphere, but would a crypto crash/saturation reduce demand for GPU's?
Yes, however right now GPUs are used to train Machine Learning Models and run the models after training.
So any AI-intensive future will need a massive GPU supply.
They are also used for playing video games with high-fidelity graphics, so gamers are usually willing to pay a premium for the newest, cutting edge GPUs.
And there has been an ongoing supply crunch for high-end GPUs which probably won't let up soon.
So right now I think there is a large, arguably pent up demand for GPU processing power which outpaces even the demand from crypto mining.
In most cases, crypto mining was done by ASICs.
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Invest in companies likely to benefit from AI? There'll be a period when there's lots of money being made; if you spread your money broadly, you'll hopefully hit at least one company that hits the magic formula. Whatever developments come, there's no world where more money gives you fewer or worse options.
Otherwise, focus on physical health, so you don't miss the AI utopia because of a stroke a month before the singularity. Education around AI may give you an edge around predicting the direction and pace of development.
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