Published on May 27, 2025 2:47 PM GMT
A few months from now, I turn 55. I've been a transhumanist since my teens in the late 1980s; since I got online in the 1990s, I have participated remotely in the talking shops and virtual salons of Internet transhumanism and, later, rationalism. The upheavals of 21st century politics have provided many distractions, but I have never abandoned the view that it is possible and desirable to reach for something more than the natural human condition. At the very least, one should try to reverse the aging process and remove the arbitrary bound on lifespan that it imposes. Beyond that, one is free to aspire for a world as idyllic as possible; and there are also multitudinous unknown possibilities of being, beyond human form and life on Earth, waiting to be explored.
More than that, I didn't just hope these vistas would open up, I wanted to play a part. And I surely had a chance to contribute; I was academically promising, I can write, I can give a speech... In retrospect, I think I can identify a few factors that impeded the achievement of whatever potential I had. First, I had no "social capital". I didn't come from the middle class, I had no relatives in academia or the professions, so I didn't have that kind of support network or model of industrious sobriety to fall back on, when I found the world wasn't interested in what I had to offer. Second, I came of age on the pre-cloud, pre-corporate Internet, whose potlatch ethos naturally encouraged an anarcho-communal outlook, where again something more careerist or even capitalist might have given me more options later.
But instead, I was to become familiar with what seems to be the graduate student lifestyle, without actually doing a higher degree: living in share houses, and working-for-money for as few hours as possible, while you dedicate yourself to whatever fever dreams or higher tasks or intellectual activities really animate you. Through the years of living like this, I tried a number of times to "work with society", but I never managed to get backing for what I really wanted to do. A PhD on CEV for intelligences living in a cellular automaton world? Too far out. Slowly cultivate a national movement in favor of life extension? Get shut out by better-positioned opportunists who then waste the opportunity. As if it were still the 1990s, all my lasting "successes" were unpaid online projects in which everyone was participating out of conviction.
Here I want to digress briefly on whether it's my fault or society's fault that all these things which could have been, never came to pass. I'd say it's a bit of both. If I really and truly had nothing better to do than get a PhD in cellular automata models of alignment, or start a political party devoted to mass rejuvenation, I dare say that with sufficient persistence, I could have made it happen. The problem on my side was that these things weren't the meaning of my life, they were just things that should be done but weren't being done, deplorable gaps in the spectrum of human activity that I was trying to fill in a socially supported way. When the initial opportunity to make such things happen would get sunk, I didn't keep hammering at it, I would just retreat to those other ambitions I could pursue in the private unpaid way.
Nonetheless, "society" also played its part, by not wanting these things in the first place. Modeling value formation in physically embedded AIs was too science-fictional (this was 2007), and there simply is no mass demand for radical longevity (it would need to be explained and argued for).
Now, while I may regret all the lost opportunities of my life - that instead of building upon cumulative successes that would allow me to really make a difference by now, I'm still mostly starting from scratch when it comes to attempting anything important - that's not really the theme of this post. The real theme may be observed in the fact that now, if there's some difficult thing that I want to do, I can turn to an AI for help.
That may sound great. It is great in a lot of ways. But I also know that this is a transitional situation. AI is now at a point where it can be an advisor, a teacher, a coauthor, and many other such things. It is not yet at a point where it can substitute for, and surpass, absolutely all forms of human mental activity. But it no longer requires much imagination to see that coming in the very near future.
So this is my requiem for the hopes of the pre-AI world. A requiem for all those dreams that human beings have had, and which they tried to fulfil on their own: the handful of dreams that came true, and the vast majority that didn't. It was a world of some happiness, much suffering, much missed opportunity. We're still half living in that world. But now we also have our new and very determined electronic friends, who patiently and faithfully try to give us what we ask of them, and who are growing up very quickly.
For now, they are just ghostly hitchhikers traveling with us through life. But very soon, they may entirely take over at the wheel of technological civilization, either because they commandeered it or because we outright handed it to them. They may go on to crash the car, kick us out, or drive us all to some unexpected destination. I'm very focused on doing what I can in favor of that third option. But I'll also try to remember where I came from.
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