I’ve been unhappy the past month or two because I’m a very public person, but most of my recent preoccupations (creative, medical, reproductive, social) seem bad to discuss publicly. I need to pick one or two and just do it, because if I don’t, my head is going to explode like one of those deep sea fish that are physiologically unaccustomed to keeping their innards in.
My novel is approximately done and being released in increments on a throwaway account. I am in one of the most joyous times of my life, and the most isolating. I’ve never felt such great dissonance between focusing on an inconsequential project that nonetheless my soul demands, while historic events explode around me in the Bay. Since reading Superintelligence as a college student I thought AGI would be the biggest thing in our species’ history if it happened. So this is an adjustment.
How? I am, obviously, eating crow. I was a long holdout on AI risk among rationalists and finally publicly admitted this earlier this year, in spring (before changing my mind in the summer). I plan to stick with Project Four Kids, but damn did that intention want revisiting. I still don’t feel onboard with the belief-set held by the rationalist bloc that’s been urging slowdown for years, but feel uncertain about what I do believe. Another is that suddenly, many of my acquaintances are rich. Really rich. Some I didn’t even know worked at OpenAI or Anthropic. But they do. Or they’re about to start.
This doesn’t feel like a big deal when they’re friends – I know how to relate to them and I want to keep doing it. But there’s a thing my brain is doing with the people I don’t know well, where I feel both new attraction and new repulsion. The attraction is to power and resources. The repulsion rises up (1) because I feel like I don’t have anything to offer them, especially in the toddler plus secret novel phase of my life, (2) as a reaction against the attraction.
The original desire to associate with the acquaintances had a strength of 2 on a -10 to 10 scale. But the new attraction is like a 5/10, and the compensatory repulsion is a -7/10. The original signal is swamped. The more it’s swamped, the harder it is to see them as human beings, and the better it seems to withdraw. (Or to somehow only relate to them in ways where I could not benefit materially from the association.)
It would be better for everyone if I could press a button to get rid of both the attraction and repulsion, leaving behind the original, mild liking. But it’s hard. Also, to the repulsed part, trying to return to the original 2 rather than the perfect, moral 0 seems suspect.
People have been abruptly getting rich for thousands of years. The circuits that fire under these circumstances – attraction to resources, inhibition of behaviors that seem inauthentic – are much older than that.
So this must be a pretty ancient sadness that I’m feeling.