While global conditions and humanity’s prospects for the future are disastrous, my own life has become a lot more stable and emotionally tolerable over the course of this past year of employment. The PhD did immense psychological damage to me. After a lifetime in a competitive education system in which I had done exceptionally well, the PhD tended to reinforce the conclusion that everything I did was bad and wrong, and that I had no control over what would happen to my life. I had serious fears about ever finding stable employment after that long and demoralizing time away from the job market (though still always working, to limit the financial damage from those extra years in school). Being out and employed — and even seeing shadows of other possibilities in the future — gives me a sense materially, psychologically, and physiologically of being able to rebuild and endure.
As noted in my pre-US-election post, having a stable home and income makes the disasters around the world seem less like personal catastrophes, though the general population are behaving foolishly when they assume that the 2020–60 period will bear any resemblance to the ‘normality’ of, say, the 1980–2020 period. Of course, there has been no such thing as intergenerational stability or normality since the Industrial Revolution; after centuries where many lives remained broadly similar, the world is now transforming every generation or faster. In the 20th century, much of that change was about technological deployment. In the years ahead, ecological disruption will be a bigger part of the story — along with the technological, sociological, and political convulsions which will accompany the collapse of systems that have supported our civilization for eons.
My own answer to living through a time of catastrophe — in many ways, literally an apocalypse and the end of humanity, as we are all thrown into a post-human future where technology and biology fuse together — is to apply myself in doing my best in everything I undertake, whether that’s photographing a conference, making sandwiches for dinner, or advocating for climate stability and reduced nuclear weapon risks.
None of us can control the world. A huge dark comet could wipe us out tomorrow. A supervolcano or a coronal mass ejection from the sun could abruptly knock us into a nuclear-winter-like world or a world where all our technology gets broken simultaneously, stopping the farm-to-citizens conveyer belt that keeps us alive. There are frighteningly grounded descriptions of how a nuclear war could throw us all into the dark simultaneously, perhaps unable to resume long-distance contact with others for months or years.
It really could happen all of a sudden, with no opportunities for takesies-backsies or improving our resilience after the fact. We live in a world on a precipice, so all we can do is share our gratitude, appreciation, and esteem with those who have enriched our lives while it is possible to do so, while retaining our determination to keep fighting for a better world, despite our species’ manifest inabilities and pathologies.
“The book then shows a minute-by-minute breakdown from multiple perspectives of a scenario in 2024 where nuclear world war erupts. In minute 0, North Korea unleashes a surprise attack, launching a Hwasong-17 ICBM with a 1-megaton thermonuclear warhead at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. America immediately detects the threat, but has no system to eliminate the North Korean ICBM during its boost phase when satellites still can detect it. America’s long-range missile defenses consist of 44 interceptor missiles, of which 4 are fired from California at the Hwasong, but all miss in minute 9. The American president’s evacuation delays the American nuclear response. By minute 16, North Korea launches a Pukguksong-1 SLBM with a thermonuclear warhead from 350 miles from California, but America’s short-range missile defenses (Aegis and THAAD) were deployed too far from America to interfere. By minute 23, the North Korean SLBM successfully strikes the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California, causing a nuclear meltdown. In minute 24, America initiates a nuclear attack on North Korea after the American president’s approval, but due to a lack of travelling range, the American Minuteman III ICBMs must fly over Russia to reach North Korea.
The North Korean ICBM obliterates Washington D.C. in minute 33, stranding and incapacitating the American president while he is being evacuated. Within the next 10 minutes, Russia’s flawed Tundra satellite system overestimates America’s 50 Minuteman ICBMs and 8 Trident SLBMs to number in the hundreds, enough to devastate Russia. Having not heard from the American president and aware of America’s past lies during wartime, the paranoid Russian president believes that America has launched against Russia. By minute 45, the Russian president orders an all-out attack on America and perceived hostile countries in NATO and Europe; in minute 50, America detects the impending Russian attack and launches its own all-out nuclear attack on 975 targets in Russia. From minute 52, North Korea is struck by 82 American nuclear warheads. At minute 55, North Korea detonates a nuclear warhead in a satellite orbiting 300 miles above America, generating a electromagnetic pulse that cripples America’s power grids, microprocessors and SCADA systems. At minute 57, Russian SLBMs destroy America’s nuclear warfighting facilities and overwhelm the nuclear bunker at Raven Rock Mountain Complex, killing the nearby American president. At minute 58, European countries including Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom are struck by Russian nuclear warheads. By minute 92 of the conflict, America was struck by around 1,000 more Russian nuclear warheads. By this time, hundreds of millions of people have been killed. The nuclear war ends less than two hours after it began, leaving most of the Northern Hemisphere decimated and uninhabitable.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario
Here is NotebookLM’s default audio overview of my last two birthday posts, with no additional user prompting.
ASI [artificial superintelligence] would be equivalent to the sudden arrival of tens of millions of above-genius-level scientists, coders, administrators, dealmakers, etc, working day and night, with a raw thinking speed that could be 10x-100x faster than human. They would make very rapid technical progress, including improving themselves. Decades or centuries of progress could happen in years, perhaps even in days in some fields. Many people have a hard time taking this seriously, in the same way Covid was hard to take seriously in January 2020, but it seems quite plausible to those paying close attention, myself included. It is not like the world has never changed like this before. Precedents include the evolution of photosynthesis, the rise of homo sapiens, and AlphaZero rediscovering all human chess knowledge in an afternoon.
https://www.educatingsilicon.com/2024/11/29/investing-for-the-singularity/