Sometimes, just sometimes, I thought that I was escaping the real world and real work under the excuse of caring about something more important, which wasn't, in fact, more important.
And yet, now that I live through the takeoff, no one cares.
I think that the society simply has yet to understand the extent of the AIs' capabilities. If a counterfactual world had a law of physics preventing the minds of unevolved origin from being capable, then the issues would've dissolved. Like, if delivering cargo to other stars requires about a hundred years, then the humans would be justified in not caring about intergalactic endowment because the colonists wouldn't be able to regularly communicate with the Earth and would quickly become independent.
Back in the day, there was some point in dismissing and laughing at transhumanist-rationalist ways. One could make the case — correct or not, but at least reasonable-sounding — that it is useless or even actively harmful to spend months in singularity daydreaming, in thinking about the future of human civilization, of the local galaxy cluster, of the entire negentropy of this Universe. It was, arguably, better, more sober, more adult, for an intelligent, ambitious man to focus on financial consulting or on building better apps.
Of course, deep in my soul, I knew, or convinced myself that I knew, that society doesn't care about superclusters not because the time is not ripe for this problem, but because society is profoundly homeostatic in its beliefs and actions.
Back in the day, although I expected to see marvels of progress beyond my imagination in my lifetime, I never really expected to live through the takeoff. There was a part of me, to be clear, which harbored the fear that the things I care about are just not relevant — at least not yet relevant — that I am akin to a medieval peasant pondering the implications of nuclear proliferation. Sometimes, just sometimes, I thought that I was escaping the real world and real work under the excuse of caring about something more important, which wasn't, in fact, more important.
And yet, now that I live through the takeoff, no one cares.
However much I may disagree with the people working at AGI labs, at least I understand them. The desire to steer the future of reality is the most natural desire one can have, under my model. And if normal people do nothing instead of doing harmful things — not because they don't want to do harmful things, but because they envision doing nothing as the only conceivable option — is that more dignity for them, or actually less? Their choice to do nothing amidst the intelligence explosion is not a moral choice; it is not a choice at all. And if they had just slightly more agency, wouldn't they do things that are worse than nothing?
And yet, it is a humiliation to see my species lying catatonic as the shockwaves of the Singularity pass through.
Of course, I would never expect the majority of people to do something useful at such a time. But yes, I expected them to do something, or at least to fear the gravity of the moment, with at least some implications for their lives.
My relationship with normal people is… evolving interestingly in the face of AI doom. A bittersweet mixture: the realization of their fleeting and fragile value — of them being the only seed of fun and sentience in the Universe, the only spark, almost faded, bearing the potential to spread this fun and sentience everywhere — and of their ignorance, apathy, and meanness in front of cosmic-scale events. Humans are the best thing in the Universe, and that is our tragedy.
And so, depending on which axis I project onto, I am becoming simultaneously more philanthropic and more misanthropic. It is humanity I want to spend the rest of my life fighting for; humanity is worth dying for; and humanity is a failure.
Regardless, I am more and more alienated from normal people. I spend less and less time trying to convince them, or even engage with them. Their plans, life goals, and lifestyles never seemed particularly compelling to me, but now they look plainly insane. As time passes, I look at them less with desperation and more with curiosity — as at an intriguing new species, or a foreign culture.
Like Mad Max, I say: in this wasteland, it is hard to say who is more crazy — me or everyone else. And indeed, one of us must be crazy. Both options are terrifying.
One can always invent some plausible story for why others don't care. Not enough time, other priorities, long inferential distances, not smart enough, and so on. If I am charitable, it's not hard to forgive.
But now is exactly the time not to be charitable. If there is any single time to have high expectations of humans, it is now. If I am to ask humans, one single time, not to be insane, it is now.
Arendt's banality was the banality of the perpetrator: evil carried out by clerks, without hatred and without thought. The banality I live in is the banality of the bystander.
I love humans. I want to love humans. But I do not trust them.
I live in the banality of takeoff.