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Humanity’s Last Prowess

by satpugnet
29th Jun 2025
1 min read
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This post was rejected for the following reason(s):

  • Insufficient Quality for AI Content. There’ve been a lot of new users coming to LessWrong recently interested in AI. To keep the site’s quality high and ensure stuff posted is interesting to the site’s users, we’re currently only accepting posts that meet a pretty high bar. 

    If you want to try again, I recommend writing something short and to the point, focusing on your strongest argument, rather than a long, comprehensive essay. (This is fairly different from common academic norms.) We get lots of AI essays/papers every day and sadly most of them don't make very clear arguments, and we don't have time to review them all thoroughly. 

    We look for good reasoning, making a new and interesting point, bringing new evidence, and/or building upon prior discussion. If you were rejected for this reason, possibly a good thing to do is read more existing material. The AI Intro Material wiki-tag is a good place, for example. 

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AI Alignment FieldbuildingAI TakeoffGeneral intelligencePivotal ActsAI

AGI will be the biggest, and likely the last, technological prowess of humanity. At this point, the most important focus of the world should be on ensuring that the transition to AGI happens smoothly. This endeavor can be divided into 3 actionable categories: ensuring pre-AGI survival, enabling AGI, and ensuring post-AGI survival.

All other technologies will be able to be accelerated by AGI, and thus, working on anything that does not relate to the narrative of AGI is a waste of time at this point. And I say that as a science nerd who admires anyone working on hard problems. However, pragmatically, it is becoming clearer by the day that every smart person should focus their energy on a successful AGI transition for humanity.

With this perspective, here is the list of technologies that are worth working on at this moment:

1. Pre-AGI Survival

  • Climate: Prevent climate change-led extinction. Arguably secondary as the climate change timelines are so long compared to AGI.
  • Defense: Prevent WW3.
  • Longevity: Minimize the number of people dying prior to AGI.

2. Enable

  • Compute: More compute.
  • Energy: More energy.
  • Robotics/Drones: More robots.
  • AGI: AGI genesis.
  • AGI infrastructure: AGI-ready socio-economic infrastructures.

3. Post-AGI Survival

  • Neurotech: BCI and brain emulation.
  • AI safety: Minimize the probability of destructive AGI.
  • Aerospace: Mars humanity backup.

Of course, those categories are very broad and they utilize a wide array of technologies and infrastructures upstream; and these are, by transition, important too, despite not being listed.

We would benefit from more focus on all of those topics. But more specifically, we need more focus on: Neurotech, AI safety, and Longevity.

Overall, keeping in mind this mental model helps evaluate how your work relates to the AGI narrative.