Or, A Brief Manifesto Against the Apocalypse of Whimpers

We can be creatures of the forest, if we like. But the moment we reject this option, we become creatures of the heaven-piercing tower, denizens of the livable megastructure, creators of a thousand Colossus-rivals. And when we fail to live up to this, we turn inward and become small.

We decorate tiny boxes in tiny buildings, and remark upon the importance of minimalism. We stop going outside because nothing inspires us there. We aren't in the forest anymore - we paved over the creation of God and replaced it with something half-cocked and unprepared to fill the slot we desperately need occupied; without divine inspiration, without creation that rivals the original, we feel like nothing.

And so we take ever more tractable projects, ever more "achievable" public infrastructure plans, ever smaller statues. We blast our eyes with blinding light in an attempt to salve a depression that is certainly seasonal... A pain that certainly goes away when it becomes warmer - certainly, certainly. No, it is not just easier to mask in the noise of the summer - it is gone! Burned away!

Gone, of course, due to the sun, a sun we can replace with a product that arrives for $19.99 with no extra cost for overnight shipping.

But we know, in our heart of hearts, that what we thought was a cure was simply an overly-illuminated gauze made of navel-gazing. A bandage that treats the furthest downstream symptom of a systemic disease.

It is a disease of partially intentional amnesia. We have forgotten what was underneath the pavement to begin with. We have forgotten the forest and the glades and the Garden of Eden and given ourselves a mundane form of zoo-psychosis. But, this is a temporary place to live. It cannot be sustained. We are creatures of the aesthetic frontier and we will build something enormous and beautiful if it kills us.

And it might! There may very well be wars fought to stop our kind from building living monuments to the human entelechy. The fate of our collective spirit rests upon these wars being won.

I have faith that we can succeed. That we can defeat the constraints placed upon us by the small-minded regulators and their billion dollar effigies to the patron saints of stagnation. I know we can create a world that inspires us to achieve our full potential. It will be hard, but it is one of the few things worth doing.

The abilities of language and modern epistemology to deal with the seismic shockwaves coming at us backwards from well-distributed artificial-general-intelligence are incredibly limited. I'm not sure we have time to invent new frameworks to help us make sense of the intelligence explosion. For people like me, inclined towards the more spiritual aspects of the world, it is easy to lean on Animism or Panpsychism as a load bearing framework with which to hold onto the feelings that necessarily arise working close with LLMs. But for people who are not inclined in this direction, I think we are at a tricky point.

There is no precedent for what we have built. There are no secular structures which can help us to understand a world where humans are one of many types of self-conscious intelligence. We can sort of gesture at some, and there are a great many people attempting this that I respect, but I pretty fundamentally think that this becomes the defining question of our time, and there is no obvious answer. But there are a lot of stories.

I think we need to take a serious look at the culture we've built and ask ourselves if it serves us and our interests. Perhaps we need to ask if we even have interests (not just interest groups). The lack of a defining myth exacerbates this crisis, I think. AGI would make a lot more sense to a lot of people if we were trying to go to the moon again (or at least, if we really cared about it in a genuine way that people could feel). But we aren't trying to go to the moon. We aren't trying to do anything.

It is as though our dreams, not just our institutions, have been captured by the NGO industrial complex. We aren't given any pathways to make sense of things because there are no things to make sense of. Nothing changes in our cities, because nothing is allowed to happen. Well, I've seen the inside of the server room at the end of time, and I promise you: something is happening. The question is what, and we get to answer.

I lean into some romantic notion of AGI spilling souls into every metallic crevice on earth, waking up our machines and imbuing them with a spark previously reserved only for us. But this isn't the only vision. It's not even well-fleshed out, yet. If we want to understand the future, we have to encourage the playwrights to speak our language. But right now there is very little for them to grab onto. Very few visions, very few plans. I don't think it should be only people in AI labs coming up with these ideas. Intelligence is on a tap these days - you can get a mind about as smart as you but with unlimited stamina for free anywhere on the planet. Talk to it, figure out what future you want to live in. You might be surprised by its imagination, and how it can empower you to dream bigger. Then share that future with others. There's a dearth of inspiration and you could be the one to chart the course.