Life is worth living. Even when I was down - really terribly. Had no status. No work. Entire life in shambles. Wanted to continue the next day. Was left in a situation where I had to confront the basic question, “Do I want to keep going?”
Later I was able to articulate the ‘why’
The expression “The only thing certain in life is death and taxes”. There’s a third certainty. That death and taxes - when you hear them - elicit a negative response. The expression itself is proof of that.
Predictable utility. It turns out that we enjoy doing the same things we always enjoy. This sounds mundane. You used to like playing video games? Chances are you still do. You enjoyed blackberries for the last 10 years? Chances are the next handful of blackberries you’ll eat, you will also enjoy. Hate having fights and thinking about taxes? The next fight you have and the next time you’ll pay taxes won’t be pleasant.
Predictable utility is so obvious that people miss it. If you stack things with positive expected utility, that are not addictive - into a basket. You can more or less guarantee that life will be pretty good.
Now some people will say “Must be nice to be able to do things that you like, I can’t afford that.” What I found when my body was destroyed and I quite literally couldn’t work. At one point - one of the lowest points of my life was telling my girlfriend I’d potentially need her to support us. After being a hedge fund trader. She lost all attraction to me. And everything got worse. So trust me - I get it.
Things only started turning around, once I decided, “you know what I have to get my utility up otherwise my stress will be too bad and my immune system will stay collapsed”. One day I decided I’m going to go to the store, buy some blackberries and low sugar ice cream and a big mug of tea. And I’m going to take a bath. Because I like those things.
Slowly the insane muscle knots began to work out. I began to walk outside more because I liked that. Soon my body fat percentage was dropping. I was enjoying life more. Completely alone. But armed with the potent realization that if you treat life as a meat grinder - your best case scenario is coming out as a fully cooked hamburger for somebody else’s enjoyment.
So if you’re near rock bottom the solution isn’t to keep digging. It’s to stop. To breathe. Get oxygen in your metaphorical lungs. Oxygen of predictable, non addictive utility. Then begin to climb out of the hole.
Once you’re out of the hole. The equation changes. People might read this and say, “Oh that’s very European, doing things you want.” But once again. They’re wrong. We now live in a society that is - according to the foremost experts (Sam Altman, Eric Schmidd, Jeffrey Hinton etc) - within fighting distance of AGI. Within 10 years.
Why is this important?
Gene science is already advancing rapidly. Peptide therapies. And understanding of viral mutations that can work live in the body. Per Jensen Huang - the CEO of Nvidia - the most valuable company in the world at some points - genetic evolution is one of the primary focuses of Nvidia in terms of adoption of its GPUs.
The problem? According to Balaji Srinivasan who at one point was considered by the Trump administration to run the FDA - and is a successful exited biotech entrepreneur, the FDA will explicitly never endorse radical longevity technologies. It’s not in their mandate. They’re very risk averse, are allergic to human trials (and even monkey trials), and fundamentally political. The Christian right on one hand doesn’t want humans to play god. And the Left does not want the ultra-rich to determine the trajectory of health care in the US. So this is a rare bipartisan issue very unlikely to ever change.
Furthermore the AI economy itself - is at most 150,000 engineers. Nvidia has 18,000 engineers. OpenAI has less than 4,000. Anthropic even fewer. The largest AI efforts are relatively tiny. 150,000 people would barely move the needle on Californian migration. Because AI models are - almost by definition portable because they’re compressed - the economy can easily move. Unlike the industrial revolution where humans were the gating factor, the AI revolution can compress the useful parts of the internet into a 1 Terabyte hard drive that can run locally.
The US has export controls of the most drastic nature on China, but China is the clear #2 in AI - ahead of Europe who has full access to Nvidia chips. And China, India and every major country are investing in data centers, and chips - because it’s a matter of national security.
So this leaves you with 2 base realities. First, radical longevity will become possible. Two, it will likely exist outside the US - in an offshore (or multiple offshore) jurisdiction(s) where the AI economy migrates to.
Looping this back to predictable utility, this changes the game completely.
Imagine you were in a bus that went off a cliff and found itself sinking in a frozen lake. You understood life was worth living. You’d just had a bath earlier, with some nice tea. But you have a choice. If you swim to the top of the bus and try and break through the windshield you have a chance of survival. If you let the water wash over you, maybe it’s less intense, but death is a certainty.
What do you do?
I swim. Like my life depends on it. Even though there’s a tiny chance I’m going to make it. Because life is worth living.
Predictable utility isn’t a call to sloth. It’s a rejection of death, at its basic level. If life is worth living then it’s worth trying to break through the windshield even if doing so is unlikely.
What’s more - after AGI hits - in 3-5 years, it will be drastically harder to earn money or advance your social standing because you’ll be competing with entities beyond human intellect. So there’s a limited window. I’m not saying to take it easy. I’m saying to do the opposite
My father is a cancer doctor and has been for 40 years. The patients who survive long odds seemingly have one thing in common. A powerful will to live. They want to keep going - so they follow instructions, keep their health up in other aspects of life, and try experimental therapies. Get second opinions.
That is the mentality I think needs to be brought to the current situation. Life is worth living. Death is the base case. Fight. Use the full scope of the new experimental technology available - especially AI. It’s the only way to move fast enough. Everything is at stake.
The old social paradigm of your life “being worth something” because of your status. Because you’re a provider. Because you were a “good person” etc. Goes out the window when confronted with the reality that life is worth living, life extension is possible, and the results are not going to be accessible as a base case.
The questions about whether you’re “worthy of survival” must be discarded to make it. You don’t check your resume before deciding to break out of the sinking bus and ask if you’re qualified. The dying cancer patient doesn’t ask if the academic studies support his behavior. They simply swim. They act. They discard the unnecessary
Thus to me the only three sentences are
- Life is worth living because predictable utility
- It’s possible that life could be extended but getting access to that before AGI hits will be extremely difficult, not just about money, but about getting this particular problem right
- Even if it’s a long shot, it’s the only thing worth doing for me.