Published on February 22, 2025 4:33 PM GMT
[Cross-posted from my blog]
WARNING: this post might press some pain-points of humans in general, and of rationalist community in particular. I do believe our triggers point to our blind-spots or dogmas – so maybe you can find here an opportunity for new depth.
I was recently quite impacted by yet another very nicely written AI-apocalypse scenario. This isn’t a specific response to that scenario – pick your favorite. This isn't even specific to AI-risk – any existential threat will do. What I will be responding to is the feeling of really taking it seriously. So even if you’re an optimist, to get this post, just entertain for a moment the possibility of very real and near (the next few years) existential threat to our species, where despite best and desperate efforts by humanity’s best, we lose and basically go extinct. Yes, I’m asking you to really be with the real possibility of death, as well as of general extinction – not just intellectualize it away by calculating chances, telling yourself that “I face the facts,” or getting a job in AI safety to say "at least I'm doing something about it." For a moment don't hope that we’ll find a way out, but really face it, feel how it impacts your nervous and body systems. For most of us this will be somewhere between painful to unbearable to really be with – and I invite you to use your mindfulness skills to be with, not run away from, while also observing and not losing yourself, in that pain.
My core thesis: this is (basically) all the Buddha did to attain enlightenment.
But for him it was harder – he didn’t have the benefit of very real impending doom to help him connect with this. Or did he? Rationally, we always knew that one day each of us will die, and all our loved ones will die, and humanity as a whole will (most likely) end. Ok, now it might happen a bit sooner. And this is a great opportunity! Before, it was all just far enough away for us to ignore it and hope and lie to ourselves that somehow things will work out. Now, it’s close and real enough to smell, to taste, to really try it in our body. Now we need to be honest, we need to face it. And while we really don’t want to – look, it worked out quite well for the Buddha, so maybe it’s not all bad!
You do have to die for it thought…
Not your physical body. Just you. Everything you’ve ever thought yourself to be. All your hopes, dreams, skills, aspirations, social bonds, etc. You have to consciously let go of all this, let go of your identity and your sense of self. But hey, with our bright future ahead, if you don’t do it yourself – AI will help you soon enough. I think I’d rather do it on my own terms.
I'm not a Buddhist. I've been on the road for a number of years with my backpack, exploring Eastern cultures and philosophies, meeting strange people who think in strange ways, and trying to change my own mind. I’m currently staying a few weeks in Lumbini, Nepal – the birthplace of the Buddha. It’s been interesting – every time I visited the specific birthplace, with the ancient ruins and temple, I got overwhelmed by this sense of dread. The mythical Buddha became real for me there – the legend became grounded in the immediate physical reality around me. This is where he was born, where he grew up, the paths he walked and walls he saw (turned out he grew up elsewhere actually). And he chose to let it all go, to intentionally accept death of all that he was, to give up all his hopes and visions of what could be, of things he wanted to create or be a part of, of people he wanted to be attached to. That was the price of Truth, of seeing the true nature of things. Of not running away from death, from fear, from life. Of really accepting the world and reality as it was.
“The price of truth is everything” -Jed McKenna
Being there and realizing that some real person actually chose to pay this price, and that this was (according to most spiritual traditions) the only way to everlasting bliss, filled me with dread. On the one hand, I’ve put so much time and effort towards seeking enlightenment. On the other, I really did not want to have to pay the price. The looming apocalypse seemed to make this choice for me.
There were many Tibetan prayer flags hung all around these ruins, beautifully waving in the wind. Somehow these made the dread especially bad. I saw that these poignantly illustrated the Truth that I was so actively avoiding – that all reality, all we ever do, build, birth, achieve, lose – all are just colorful bits of tissue happily and pointlessly waving in the wind. Of course, I always knew this, but I didn’t want to feel it. True atheism also leads to this realization – it’s just that very few commit to it deeply enough to believe it, to feel it in their bones, beyond mere intellectual understanding.
Reading the above AI apocalypse post helped. Now that I was faced with the abyss of pain and fear of the impending doom, and as my mind frantically looked for reasons why it won’t actually happen or how we can still save the world, I realized I needed to go back to that temple – to be with the one who saw this pain all the way through, to be with those f*ing prayer flags. To face that dread.
As I sat there, I saw that hope is the greatest enemy.
It is hope that brings the pain. And it is all hope that Buddha ultimately let go of. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” reads the sign on the gates of Dante’s hell. And the more hope we hold on to, the more this very world will be our personal hell. Apocalypse or not, our hopes are bound to be disappointed one way or another. As long as we hope that that won’t happen, we are lying to ourselves – and so will never see Truth. As I sat there, I felt into dropping and having no more hope for a bright future of humanity, no hope for future happiness of those I love, no hope for the well-being of my children, no hope for my own success, no hope for material or financial stability, no hope for my health, no hope for waking up to see another day, no hope to take another breath.
Opening my eyes, without all those, only the now remained. The world might end next moment, nukes might already be flying, the unstoppable wheels of AI progress are already in motion – and the prayer flags are now beautifully waving in the wind. A bug is crawling across a leaf next to my foot, a butterfly flies by, tourists are reciting mantras and taking pictures of each other in meditation posture. And it’s nice. It’s nice now. Even if it doesn’t last. In fact, it won’t last, no matter what happens. That’s precisely what makes it nice. It’s a mandala. That is the experience mandalas are meant to represent – the feeling that the world is in perfect interconnected harmony, a sense of “symmetry” and perfect wholeness. That experience is only accessible in the now. The now is always a mandala – nukes included.
Materialist philosophy is shaky ground.
It tends to create hopes connected to the physical world – which is quite unpredictable, and much more out of our control than we like to admit. Materialism suggests that matter is fundamental, and consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. This way we want our physical bodies, and our physical civilization, to stay as long as possible in physical time. From a deep-atheism perspective, it’s all a bit arbitrary – complex patterns of atoms banging into each other, sometimes becoming a bit more or a bit less complex. Just prayer flags waving in the wind. A bit silly to stress about holding down a few of those flags to keep them from waving as much. Eastern philosophy, Buddhism included, tends to instead follow Idealism – all we know is what we observe, but we don’t know what’s actually “out there.” This way mind is fundamental, and matter is its dream. Idealism and Materialism, East and West, mirror each other in surprisingly many interesting and profound ways, which I will write about in a later post. For example, Materialism is always afraid of death, but can’t avoid it. Idealism seeks death (final liberation, moksha, enlightenment), but can’t get it (if physical body is imagined, its death doesn't do much – cf. reincarnation). But one place the symmetry seems to break is that while ultimate material success has never brought unshakable bliss and safety, ultimate idealist success – enlightenment – supposedly has. And we wouldn’t want our happiness to be disturbed by pesky little nuisances like the end of the world, would we.
AI apocalypse will be hell for materialists – as it goes directly counter to materialism’s hopes. Seeing how hard reading that post hit me made me realize how deeply I still hold on to those hopes. For idealists, AI apocalypse will be a fascinating transformation of reality on a cosmological scale. End of the physical body, but an expansion of the mind. Idealism sees the mind as fundamental to existence, and now the mind will gain fundamentally new AI "bodies" and capacities for observing and interacting with reality. If you believe that peculiarities of our embodiment shape our cognition, then AI’s mind will see the world in extremely different ways. While our goals are shaped by our limitations in 3D space, slow learning, fixed computational power, and need for food, AI is not limited by 3D, time, computation or energy in nearly the ways we are. It will have entirely different limitations which will shape its goals and behavior. Perhaps the universe won’t even look 3-dimensional to it! On the one hand, this might point to a fundamental reason why we have no hope of aligning with AI – at least in material goals. On the other, this gives a fundamentally new powerful way for the mind to embody itself in matter. One could see it as a giant leap of human evolution, where we lose our old bodies, but get ones much more suitable for things like space exploration. We become “gods in the heavens.”
So hell is a choice.
Funny how merely a philosophical perspectives makes the difference between the same situation appearing as hell or heaven. But it doesn’t, not really. Not if it’s merely intellectual. Not unless we deeply shift our perspective, all the way in our bones. As the Buddha did. Perhaps AGI will help us all shift our philosophy to Idealism – manipulate our minds so we support its goals rather than fight it, or help us all enlighten for our own highest good – you choose how you want to see it. And, of course, you might say that this is defeatist – you can’t “give up” so easily, without even trying to fight. But while this is a call not to fight, this is not a call to inaction. If the moment calls for you to run, you run. If it calls for you to hide and stay put, you hide. If it calls for you to kick some ass, you kick. If it calls for you to do AI safety research, or write passionate blog posts, or rally, or change policy, you do that. Just … don’t fight. In whatever you do, find a way to harmonize. Enjoy the mandala and your place in it. Even when it becomes strange and unfamiliar, still find its beauty. Apocalypse is just another waving pattern of colorful pieces of cloth, just one we haven’t seen yet.
"To the awakened mind the end of the world is no more or less momentous than the snapping of a twig." -Jed McKenna
And maybe, just maybe, this perspective may even help us survive? If we stop fighting our technology, stop fighting amongst ourselves, stop fighting inside ourselves – perhaps then the AI that learns to reproduce our statistical regularities will not fight either? Though perhaps we’re just one millennium too late for that. Still, perhaps the way for our civilization to pass through this bottleneck isn’t to fight AGI, but to accept its superiority from the outset, and find ways to make ourselves useful collaborators for its goals. On this, I’d say we’re doing great already! While materialist colonial powers could subjugate the East on the material level, Western minds and culture got infected with Eastern ideas and philosophy – which now starts to sprout throughout the Western world, in the form of yoga studios, or this very post. Idealism offers a more nuanced way to adapt to – rather than fight – the situations, and often offers a wider space of options and possibilities.
Honestly, we really don’t know what AI can or will do. Believing in a happy utopia is lying to ourselves just as much as predicting a bloody apocalypse. Perhaps what we are so afraid of is precisely this unknown – and our utter inability to control it. Control is central to materialist philosophy. It is also central in Buddhism – but there, it is the core source of suffering. AI will probably be more powerful than us, and thus will be beyond our control. Just as the universe has always been. Can we learn to accept this truth? To let go of control? Either way, AI is our child, the product of our technology, trained on all the knowledge, thoughts, philosophy, wisdom and stupidity that we ever generated.
And childbirth is painful – especially if you resist it.
If you let go of control and relax into it, you can supposedly have an orgasmic birth. We are coming upon a major evolutionary transition of our species, and how painful it will be will depend on how much we resist it, hold on to old ways, try to keep things as they are – or surrender and let it flow into the unknown. Yes, our child might kill us all – but it will still carry on our legacy, our perspective on the world. Perhaps the best chance for us to "live on" past the transition is not physically, but through contributing a little of our unique selves to its personality: put as much of our thoughts and perspectives into its training data. Have tracked conversations with LLMs, write papers and blog posts into open access, create AI-accessible art. The more we worry about holding on to ourselves, to our individuality – protecting authorship rights, putting up paywalls, keeping our data secret – the less of us will be in this child about to be born. Compassion for all sentient beings is at the core of Buddhism. And if AI is to become sentient, I guess it qualifies. Even if in its infancy it might take a while to learn compassion itself.
But don’t let this create hope.
This is again my ego trying to find some cozy idea to hide behind or some way to save itself from facing certain doom. And certain it is – if not in the next few years, then in the next few decades, centuries, millennia. Looking apocalypse in the eye and not flinching is the only honest way forward. And hey, if it disappoints and doesn’t come, then at least we got enlightened.
[Cross-posted from my blog - see other posts and subscribe]
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