A defence of slowness at the end of the world
Since learning of the coming AI revolution, I’ve lived in two worlds. One moves at a leisurely pace, the same way it has all my life. In this world, I am safely nestled in the comfort of indefinite time. It’s ok to let the odd day slip idly by because there are always more.
The second moves exponentially faster. Its shelf-life is measured in a single-digit number of years. Its inhabitants are the Situationally Aware; the engineers and prophets of imminent AI transformation. To live in this world is to possess what Ezra Klein calls “an altered sense of time and consequence”.
I find that it’s psychologically untenable to spend all that much time in the Fast World. I can handle it for minutes to hours, but my mind invariably snaps back into its default state like I’m pulling my hand out of ice water.
Occupying the Slow World is ultimately a form of denial. I can’t call it anything other than compartmentalisation, yet I actually advocate for it. Of course, those of us trying to move the needle on AI risk should work in the Fast World, but I claim that we shouldn’t live in it. I will try to make the case for why.
I am worried that too much time spent in the Fast World will make me less invested in other people. Earnest belief in the coming singularity can make everything land with a little less weight. If the world ends or is otherwise rendered unrecognisable in two years, then the joys, triumphs, setbacks and adversities of my family and friends lose gravitas. Their implications are fewer, and their impact will be brief. This is why I try to occupy the Slow World most of the time. To wholeheartedly celebrate some achievement or milestone, or to suffer a tragedy, is to envision the future. If a friend of mine gets engaged, I want to share in their anticipation of a happily-ever-after lasting decades, because this is what it will mean to be happy for them. And if someone I love gets ill or dies, I want to feel the pain of contemplating many years spent without them, because this is what it will mean to grieve. I want to really believe in those futures. I want to delude myself as thoroughly as I can. Because this is how I will feel these moments as they deserve to be felt. I do not want my mind to qualify them with an unspoken countdown.
Those of us among the Situationally Aware must be on our guard against arrogance. To anticipate some transformation that most live in ignorance of can easily breed self-importance. But worse, it can degrade the way that we perceive the efforts of others. It can lead us to view any enterprise that won’t ultimately bear fruit in an ASI-by-2027 world with something that approaches pity or derision. Those sweet summer children with dreams of studying computer science at university, don’t they know that AIs are already competitive with human coders? Tragic that people are out here making five and ten-year career plans, don’t they know that planning over anything longer than a six-month timeframe is hopeless?
This attitude can colour the way you perceive the whole world. It can make everyone – teenagers on their way to school, business people on their rush-hour commute, joggers on a morning run – appear to you like swimmers battling hopelessly against a tsunami they cannot see, their labour fruitless, misguided and tragic. It can make you feel sorry for them. This is an attitude towards the rest of the world that I want to avoid at all costs. Partly out of humility, since of course, the Situationally Aware could be wrong, which would make this misplaced pity all the more objectionable in retrospect! But even if they’re right, this simply isn’t the way that I want to relate to my fellow human beings. I don’t want to presume that they’d act any differently if they knew what (I think) I know. I don’t want to possess a mindset that robs human endeavour of its purpose.
Sometimes in apocalypse movies, there’s a certain dramatic irony that makes humanity look like the butt of the joke. In the exposition, before it all starts going south, they’re embroiled in petty dramas or griping about traffic or the weather. And then the asteroid hits or the nuke lands or the zombie virus starts to spread, and civilisation meets its undignified end as if in chiding punishment for its obliviousness. But I think there’s plenty of dignity in being caught right in the middle of something when some unforeseen disaster occurs, of being in the midst of whatever you would always have been doing. As I was struggling to articulate this thought, I realised that CS Lewis already said it much better than I ever could in 1948:
If I might project my own slightly flimsy thesis onto the work of CS Lewis, I choose to read this as an endorsement of living in the Slow World.
Spencer Greenberg of Clearer Thinking recently wrote that believing you only have one option is dangerous. Grasping to preserve what you believe is your sole choice can lead to poor decision-making, like tolerating abuse in a relationship or staying in the wrong job. I think this argument extends to believing you have very little time. To live in the shadow of an impending singularity can make every opportunity appear as one of an ever-dwindling number. It can end in money you wish you hadn’t spent, sex you wish you hadn’t had, or nights you wish you hadn’t drunk so much. It can obscure opportunities whose benefits might take longer to manifest. Staying in the Slow World can guard against impulsivity. It can expand your menu of options, and make you more likely to take bets that will pay off in longer timelines (which we might be lucky enough to get!). It’s ok to comfort yourself with age-old adages meant to stave off myopicism – that you’re still young, that you’ve got your whole life ahead of you and that there’s always next year. It’s ok to really believe these adages and to live as if they are true.
I think my final defence of the Slow World is more a matter of personal preference. And that is simply that I prefer it. I have never lived fast, and learning that I may die young hasn’t changed that. I am not a thrill seeker. I don’t want to live like there’s no tomorrow, because living without a guaranteed tomorrow is scary and unpleasant! It inspires anxiety, not motivation. Some of the joy I experience is in novelty, but much of it isn’t. It is in the mundane and the repetitive, the things that would make the movie of my life a boring watch, but which make it no less wonderful to live. Three cups of coffee in bed on a Sunday morning, watching the same TV shows again and again and leaving a few months between rounds so that they are always imbued with fresh flavour like a new piece of gum, going to the same pub on the corner with my housemates every other weekend, frittering away the entire subsequent day together while we recover from our hangovers. I want to let the days, weeks and months slip by without counting them. I choose to do so intentionally.
All of the above is how I (try to) deal with the possibility of short timelines. I’m by no means perfect at it. Some days I spend a little more of my time in the Fast World than I’d like. It may not resonate with everyone. I’m sure there are others out there who feel the opposite. There are also ways that contemplating short timelines has shaken me out of certain malaises and sharpened my appreciation for the world around me. But on the whole, I intend to carry on as normal – because normal is more than enough for me.
Thanks for this post.
As someone who has been working on this topic for years, had short timelines all along, and is seeing things go down the drain as expected, I definitely resonate with your observations of sometimes being trapped in the fast world. I remember feeling like it was meaningless when my brothers finished high-school and decided on their careers, even though I was happy for them, and wanted to be happy for them.
I've also worked recently on being able to genuinely want things in the long term again. I had burned myself out of it, from the stress and the worry about the end of the world. But there is a form of dignity and courage in being willing to hope for a future, even when you know it might really not come to pass.
I'd only add one thing to your post. You present the slow world mostly as a preference, and almost as an indulgence. But to me, it's more meaningful than that: the slow world is what we're fighting for. I don't work on solving AI-risks because I'm excited about the thrill of the fast world; I work on it because I want to recover the slow world, for me, for my friends, for my family, for every single human on earth.
And though we can't constantly stay in the slow world (that would be denial), to come back to it again and again is to remember why what we're fighting for.
As someone who's been living in the Fast World a lot recently, I'm really glad you wrote this. But I think this also extends beyond thinking about AI Doom; for me personally, I find that living a healthy life requires me to act as if I am functionally immortal, as if I will have far more than 70-80 years to live in the best cases. Because If I didn't act this way, I would almost certainly spend a lot of time agonizing about which books I take the time to read, which movies I take the time to watch, and all the hours I spend going on walks or sitting around aimlessly. So perhaps this counterintuitive necessity is as old as humanity itself, even if 2-3 year timelines make it feel more salient.