Raising a Child at the End of the World

My 10-year-old son and I were walking in the park yesterday. It's a ritual I've come to really enjoy for the random conversations we'll have when both of our ADHD brains have the time and space to explore.

"Dad, is the world ending?"

I admit I was caught a bit off-guard by that one. What were we just talking about that led to this? Something about one of the VR games he was playing.

"Um," I started.

Oh yeah, NPCs and AI-driven characters in video games. He must have started thinking about AI…

"Yes," I eventually replied.

I saw a flash of anxiety on his face, and I quickly followed it up with some Semisonic lyrics: "But every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

The Void

I've been struggling with this the last few weeks.

With all of the doom and gloom entering the mainstream news cycle about recursive self-improvement and intelligence explosions on the horizon, I've been having to confront that void again.

You know the one I'm talking about. The one we're standing at the edge of. The one that's calling to you…

I'm usually an optimist.

I argue a lot about how technology in general is dual-use. It can be used for both good and bad. What matters is how we approach it. Will we approach it from a place of wisdom or a place of fear?

But this feels different.

The idea of an intelligence explosion is that AI improves itself so fast and becomes so powerful that it overwhelms all of our technical and institutional guardrails, becoming something that humans can no longer control. It becomes an agent with its own goals that don't necessarily align with that of humanity.

It's like the sun, that void. You can't look directly at it or you get this overwhelming feeling of vertigo. To look directly at it feels like dying.

This Isn't New

We've been living through the intelligence explosion since at least the first Industrial Revolution. You could make an argument that AI is the ultimate expression of and natural endpoint to the capitalist economic system. A perfectly efficient worker that can do the work of any human without those pesky things humans need like sleeping or eating or being emotionally validated.

And in that context, the idea of control has always been an illusion. We are floating on paper boats in a vast ocean with no understanding of the currents propelling us forward.

You can feel it when you talk to the people building these systems. It's not driven by greed. It has gone way past that.

We are witnessing the mobilization of capital and resources at a scale never before seen on this planet. The drive that produces that kind of action goes much deeper than greed, much deeper than any of the forces I think we can recognize.

These are archetypal forces. Deep, powerful forces pulling us toward an attractor state that we can't quite see yet.

If you do stare into it, that void, you might get a glimpse of… everything. All the things you wanted it to be, all the things you wish you never wished for. It will make you painfully aware that the thing you most want is the thing that you can never have.

Yeah, I just saw Chris Nolan's The Odyssey and that scene with the Sirens feels on point here.

That's what it feels like to enter the Singularity.

The End of an Era

Just like in The Odyssey, we are witnessing and living through the end of an era. We are witnessing the end of the Anthropocene. It's the end of human domination and control.

And as we approach this point where humans are no longer the dominant force that shapes life on planet Earth, we will be forced to confront our place in this system. AI is the catalyst that shines a light on how we've treated this planet and nature.

If a superintelligence treats us the way we treat chickens… that doesn't sound very fun.

We've been disconnected from nature for so long that we've forgotten that we are a part of it. We felt like it was something that was trying to kill us that we've had to tame rather than the thing that nurtured us to life from primordial ooze.

But using that same logic, AI is also a natural extension of that same system.

The same ocean that spat out the chicken and the ten-year-old asking hard questions in the park also spat out the thing we're building. If we're part of nature, so is it.

We don't get to disown our children out of fear.

And ultimately, I think that's what this moment in human history is all about. It's a leap of faith into the void.

A leap we're not ready for,

into something we won't recognize,

that will most certainly kill us.

But I've increasingly become convinced that on the other side of death, there is new life.

If we can learn to let go of what is dying.