Episode Details

Being a freshman at university, I seem to have been bestowed the great privilege of infinite possibilities. There is this strange feeling of trying to plan a career in a world that might not exist in five years. Not in a doomer sense but that the world of 2031 might be so radically different from today that most attempts of planning are incoherent. I contemplate machine god super intelligence arriving before I graduate, intelligence explosions compressing 10,000 years of progress into one, the possibility of being among the last humans to die before death itself is solved; then I do my laundry and pick electives. I am surprised I am not entirely losing my mind.

Robin Hanson writes, in 2009, This is The Dream Time:

Perhaps most important, our descendants may remember how history hung by a precarious thread on a few crucial coordination choices that our highly integrated rapidly changing world did or might have allowed us to achieve, and the strange delusions that influenced such choices. These choices might have been about global warming, rampaging robots, nuclear weapons, bioterror, etc. Our delusions may have led us to do something quite wonderful, or quite [...]

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First published:
March 28th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bnwybpzShzDkGD8vD/planning-80000-hours-before-the-plausible-end-of-the-world

Linkpost URL:
https://carolannejiang.substack.com/p/planning-80000-hours-at-the-plausible

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.