(Adapted from a post on my Substack.)
Since 2010, much of my academic research has focused on the roadmap to broadly superhuman AI, and what that will mean for humanity. In that line of work, I've had hundreds of conversations with ordinary folks about topics familiar here on LessWrong—especially existential risk, longevity medicine, and transformative automation. When I talk about such sci-fi sounding futures, people often respond something like: “Well that all sounds great and/or terrifying, but supposing you’re right, what should I do differently in my daily life?”
So I've compiled eleven practical ways I encourage people to live differently today if they believe, as I do, that AGI is likely to arrive within a decade. These probably won't be revolutionary for most in the LW community, but I offer them here as a potentially useful distillation of ideas you've been circling around, and as a nudge to take seriously the personal implications of short timelines. This can also serve as a bite-size accessible explainer that may be helpful for sharing these concepts with friends and family.
1. Take the Italy trip. As I’ve argued elsewhere, AGI means that the future will probably either go very well or very badly. If it goes well, you will probably enjoy much greater material abundance than you do today. So if you put off that family trip to Italy to save your money, that money will provide a much smaller relative boost to your quality of life in 2040 than if you took the trip today. And if AGI goes badly, you could be literally killed—an outcome well-known to make tourism impossible. Either way, take the trip now. This doesn’t mean you should max out all your credit cards and live a life of short-sighted hedonism. But it does mean that your relative preference for spending money today to saving it for decades from now should be a lot stronger than in worlds where AGI weren’t coming. Concretely, if you’re in your 30s or younger, you’ll usually be better off spendin