A surprising portion of what I do has become interpreting the world and managing long-term projects for which no verifier exists, and even if one did, the rewards would be uneconomical to compute. This seems to have been stable for some time now, but I do fear that my current ability to contribute to the economy is nearing its end, at which point all I can do is consume.

Will there even be an economy? The question has me hallucinating messianic thoughts of a super intelligent being ridding me of the human condition. That is, if I actually cared? Do I need to be useful to society? By extension to the universe?

Last night I was having a conversation with a friend where we talked about how AGI taking my current function might not burden me as much, but it’s not going to stop there. It’s going to take away goal posts from the entirety of humanity. I explained to him, “Humans are not able to survive without meaning; if there were no goal posts distracting us from asking the big questions of existence, what will we do instead?”

He said something that left me dumbfounded: “We will understand the universe so well that …” and then, joking: “We might even be able to travel back in time.” I jumped from my seat and gasped, “Oh! I can travel back to a time where we didn’t get AGI’d in my lifetime. I can find a vestigial reason to exist.”

Even through the understanding of how fictitious this is, I realized. There are many ways to delude oneself to adhere to a locally attributed meaning. Perhaps we can do this ad infinitum! Should we be thwarted from “the doing”, enraged by the meaninglessness of existence, we can satiate the need through make-believe.

Perhaps this ad infinitum has always been a rolling figure; we have always been in an endless cycle of finding meaning; this would actually not be a terrible simulation theory for those who partake.

Thus, my fear of extinction transformed into hopes of “once again” placing myself in a self-made universe where I can derive meaning from knowing the unknowable. Maybe this time, just this once, I will make sure I won’t get to experience such a disastrous end to my purpose.

Thanks to my friends Ishaan & †https://sshl.in/ for reading the first draft :)