Here’s a list of alternative high level narratives about what is importantly going on in the world—the central plot, as it were—for the purpose of thinking about what role in a plot to take:

The US is falling apart rapidly (on the scale of years), as evident in US politics departing from sanity and honor, sharp polarization, violent civil unrest, hopeless pandemic responses, ensuing economic catastrophe, one in a thousand Americans dying by infectious disease in 2020, and the abiding popularity of Trump in spite of it all.
Western civilization is declining on the scale of half a century, as evidenced by its inability to build things it used to be able to build, and the ceasing of apparent economic acceleration toward a singularity.
AI agents will control the future, and which ones we create is the only thing about our time that will matter in the long run. Major subplots:
- ‘Aligned’ AI is necessary for a non-doom outcome, and hard.
- Arms races worsen things a lot.
- The order of technologies matters a lot / who gets things first matters a lot, and many groups will develop or do things as a matter of local incentives, with no regard for the larger consequences.
- Seeing more clearly what’s going on ahead of time helps all efforts, especially in the very unclear and speculative circumstances (e.g. this has a decent chance of replacing subplots here with truer ones, moving large sections of AI-risk effort to better endeavors).
- The main task is finding levers that can be pulled at all.
- Bringing in people with energy to pull levers is where it’s at.
Institutions could be way better across the board, and these are key to large numbers of people positively interacting, which is critical to the bounty of our times. Improvement could make a big difference to swathes of endeavors, and well-picked improvements would make a difference to endeavors that matter.
Most people are suffering or drastically undershooting their potential, for tractable reasons.
Most human effort is being wasted on endeavors with no abiding value.
If we take anthropic reasoning and our observations about space seriously, we appear very likely to be in a ‘Great Filter’, which appears likely to kill us (and unlikely to be AI).
Everyone is going to die, the way things stand.
Most of the resources ever available are in space, not subject

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Robb Dawson

Robb Dawson