Eliezer Yudkowsky

And if you're like a brilliant young physicist, then you could go into interpretability.

And if you're smarter than that, you could work on alignment problems where it's harder to tell if you got them right or not.

And other things.

But mostly for the kids in high school, it's like, yeah, if it... Be ready for...

to help if Eliezer Yudkowsky is wrong about something and otherwise don't put your happiness into the far future.

It probably doesn't exist.

It feels like a very, very basic competence that you are praising me for.

And, you know, like, okay, cool.

I don't think it's good that we're in a world where that is something that I deserve to be complimented on.

But I've never had much luck in accepting compliments gracefully.

Maybe I should just accept that one gracefully.

Yeah.

I grew up reading books like Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, and later on Engines of Creation and Mind Children, you know, like age 12 or thereabouts.

So I never thought I was supposed to die after 80 years.

I never thought that humanity was supposed to die.

I thought we were like...

I always grew up with the ideal in mind that we were all going to live happily ever after in the glorious transhumanist future.

I did not grow up thinking that death was part of the meaning of life.

And now I still think it's a pretty stupid idea.

You do not need life to be finite to be meaningful.