A few weeks back, I was in SF and just missed Amit Pradhan, with whom I recorded a podcast on how to live in the future over a year ago. You can check it out here: https://youtu.be/SL82mmGnWEI I did manage to catch up with Jason Kende, and had a fascinating conversation with a brilliant friend of his. She told me how she had spent some time a few years ago to project how the world might change over the next 50 years in order to map out her own decisions. She really focused on the inevitability of the singularity, in this case defined as the emergence of exponentially superintelligent AI, the eventual creation of two classes of people based on their proximity to neural uplink technology, and the need to stay ahead of the curve. As some of you may remember, I went through a phase right before graduating college where I was unhealthily obsessed with AI safety. I was consumed with fear from ideas like the paperclip problem, where a superintelligent AI misinterprets a command to make more paperclips and turns the entire universe into paperclips. It was all I could talk about for at least a few years and was probably super annoying. To be fair, it did lead to a career in AI before my bright future devolved into crypto degeneracy, so it wasn’t all for nothing. As Jason’s friend continued to describe the future she saw, I was struck by the similarity with my thinking then, and I found that even though I agreed with the general direction of what she was saying, I didn’t have the same reverence for AI any more. I think a big reason is that AI doesn’t actually exist. What I mean by this is that our definition of artificial intelligence has continuously shifted throughout the years. Twenty years ago Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess and clearly heralded the pending triumph of machines over mankind, although in retrospect all they did was throw a bunch of computing power to work through the potential moves, and really nothing special. It had long fallen out of the limelight when Watson won Jeopardy. But these days it’s clear Watson was nothing but some hilariously overfitted NLP models hooked up to a search engine, and therefore barely worth mentioning. These days I suppose self-driving cars or Dota bots are the cutting edge of AI. One of these days someone will look back at these projects and realize these computer scientists were just hand-crafting deep learning subsystems in a reinforcement learning framework, and so were able to conjure some entertaining sideshows but fell well short of real AI and are merely a technical novelty.  My point is that what people consider real AI will always be the next shiny technobauble, because AI is just a reflection of the latest attempt to overcome our inadequacies. If there’s one thing AI has always done well, it’s highlighting how feeble we are, and how utterly alone. I think everything that needs to be said about AI was already captured in the Jewish stories about the golem. They generally start with some person making a creature out of clay and bringing it to life with the word of God, or a shem. The golem would start off doing household chores and would inevitably run amok, at which point the creator would panic and remove the shem from the golem and cause it to fall to pieces. This 16th century story has all the elements for any piece of fiction about AI ever made. Now, I do agree that we’re heading in the direction of a violent stratification of society. In fact we’re probably already there. But notwithstanding the outstanding work being done by groups like DeepMind or OpenAI, these days I’m no longer particularly worried that artificial intelligence will be the death of us all, because omnicidal, out-of-control paperclip machines already exist – they’re called corporations. In today’s society, if a corporation can spend 1 dollar to gain 1.01 dollars in revenue, it’s not just considered bad form to not do so, it’s a breach of fiduciary duty and requ