The Candle is Still Burning
3 min read
"It's never too late, until it's too late"
There is an old Jewish saying: “As long as the candle is burning, there is still time to set things right”. If you're reading this, your candle is still burning, and you can still repair the world. As with many romantic sayings, this one is also not true. Sometimes it is too late.
For most beings living inside human civilization, it is too late from the moment they are born. Their execution day was already set, and they have zero chance to change their fate. Think about a fish in a factory farm, he has no way to understand the matrix he was born into, he has no chance to get out of it, lacking by orders of magnitude the mental capacity, the tools and the physical ability to escape what was designed for him as a human dominated being.
For every human who ever lived, with a potential life expectancy of no more than ~100 years, the moment they were born was probably already “too late” to reverse aging and prevent death. They could not escape it, no matter what they did. But you were born into a different era. It is still not too late for almost anything, but it could be too late for everything very soon.
On the one hand, the promise of artificial superintelligence can bring abundance and possibilities, such as biological freedom and longevity escape velocity, that we could only dream of a few years ago.
On the other hand, looking at the trajectory of AI progress, we soon may be in the position of the factory farmed fish, totally dominated, having no understanding of the simulated world built for us, having no influence over the world or our own destiny. If we don’t get our shit together ASAP, our chance to make a difference will burn out long before our candle ever will.
This is the real ticking clock: not when AI kills us all, but when we will be powerless to set things right. The historian Yuval Noah Harari is working on a new book, and he says it may be his last one. If in several years' time you can write a book with one prompt, what will be the point of spending years on writing a book? What will be the point in researching, thinking, speaking or developing technology, when we will be so bad at it compared to the AI species? It will be like asking a monkey to do physics. What’s the point of digging into the mountain with a hammer when the giant tunneling machines would be ready? We are about to lose control. Now is the time to act. Now the candle of impact is still burning. Now we can still make a true difference.
If you're considering an impact career but you think it's too soon, you're wrong. The time is now. If you're considering an impact career but you're saying, "Yeah in another year, when I am more settled," you're wrong. This year is very precious, we may not have a lot of time. If you're thinking, "Yeah I want an impact career but I need to improve my skills first," you're wrong. Improve them while pursuing an impact career. The time is now. Just do it. How much time do we have? Maybe several years, maybe a few tens of years. Maybe more, who knows...
