[_cjse]

I decided early on that wasting my one existence trying to solve a problem that seemed unsolvable wasn't what I wanted to do, especially given the stakes (it's very easy to reason yourself into working 14 hour days if you think it means saving the world is 0.001% more likely). However, I never found a satisfying argument against the default outcome being doom.

The closest I ever came to a "solution" is to target the economic forces which lead to people researching and innovating on AI. I eventually found fine-based bounties to be an unusually potent weapon, not only here, but against all kinds of possible grey- and black-urn technologies. I wrote up my thoughts very briefly about a year ago, and they still live at [url-redacted], but I suspect the argument is fundamentally flawed in a way I as a non-academic don't have time to suss out.

So I find myself in a strange place: Live my life mostly as normal, with a good chunk of my finances in low cost index funds, just in case the exponential starts shooting up - and just in case we don't all perish soon afterwards. C'est la vie.