Episode Details

This is a crosspost from the Forward Pass substack with the author's permission.

What should you expect your life to look like in the future? Almost everybody is overconfident about what their life will look like in the next 30 years. For most people this is due to an underappreciation of the transformative potential of AI, but for others it's due to an underappreciation of how unique their current positions are.

For anything, the greater change you anticipate, the more you should widen your range of possibilities to expect. When walking in a random direction, a good guess for how your surroundings will look tomorrow is what they look like today. But if you’re flying a plane in a random direction, where you are today tells you very little about what your surroundings will look like tomorrow. A better estimate would be the average of what surroundings look like everywhere on Earth. Visually, this looks like a smearing out of our expectations about the future.

Similarly, the more change we expect from AI (and we should expect a lot), the more we should expect our lives to resemble the average baseline of a life [...]

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Outline:

(02:20) How should we be more uncertain about the future?

(02:25) Income

(04:53) Geopolitics

(06:07) Further widening

(07:25) A fog over the future

(08:09) A Veil of Ignorance

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First published:
May 30th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gzrw7wttzucP2bq6Z/the-singularity-is-a-veil-of-ignorance

Linkpost URL:
https://theforwardpass.substack.com/p/the-singularity-as-a-veil-of-ignorance

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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