The Hellenic View of Existential Risk

When I was a teen, I read much of the Less Wrong and the rationalist work of the day. This provided the basis for a vague worry surrounding "existential risk." The feeling was pervasive, and I would read works about the dangers of AI or other technology to humanity's future existence and feel a tightening in my stomach, dreading the future.

Recently, I've noticed that this genre of thought has started to feel quite immature to me. This is not meant as a dig at the thinkers, who I generally find intelligent and I respect their ability to reason through difficult problems and act in accordance with their stated values. Instead, I believe it comes down to a lost sense of aesthetics and art that is pervasive in this crowd of intellectuals.

As Nietzsche discusses in "The Birth of Tragedy," we can look at our culture as an "Alexandrine-Socratic" one, which is namely a scientific culture based on the notion of the optimistic exploration of the truth.

What our current intellectuals seem to lack is any real feeling of the "tragic," or in other words the clear perception of the nature of suffering in this world, with the knowledge of the underlying ever present joy that underlies all phenomena. This fact is continuously obstructed under the secular-materialism that rests on the idea that "progress" rests on the continual search of ever deeper truth as the answer to any sense of meaning. After all, why look directly at the suffering in life when the "real work" to be done is also the thing that is valuable?

The Hellenic tragedy is the synthesis of these two worldviews. We can both value the search for truth of nature in this world while also staring into the abyss of human suffering to realize how shallow it actually is, and seeing the real joy underneath.

It is with this perspective that I see existential risk, not as a thing to be stopped or avoided at all costs, but as an aesthetic question of the nature of reality that we ought to lean into. Is our reality in which the pursuit of truth and knowledge destined to lead to self-destruction, or is it the ultimate pursuit to bring us to a higher existence? In answering this question, one way or the other we will get to experience the greatest tragedy or comedy that could ever be written. There is no need to fear the extinction of humanity, as our extinction contains as much beauty and joy as our continued existence.

So I invite others to take this view seriously for a moment and see if you too feel the loosening of the knot in your stomach, created through a sense of worry that there is no need to feel.

The tragic view of life may be beautiful when applied to the small footprint of the bronze age, but I can't "amor fati" when the likeliest existential risk in the modern world is that, through differential fertility, the median human becomes too dumb and weak to maintain technological society. I think there's a reason that tragedians concern themselves with kings and not slaves, and that no classical author wrote a tragedy about slaves living in the remnants of an abandoned city.

Visualize any x-risk, in specific detail, and you'll see that they don't resemble Sophocles writing Oedipus and his parents falling victim to fate through imperfect knowledge and their own hubris, but more like a post-modern hack killing off his characters in order to frustrate an audience that expects plots to resolve. The only beautiful end to humanity one could imagine is with someone choosing, with full knowledge, to heed Silenus's wisdom for themselves and the rest of the world.

I don't have a compelling counter-argument but I disagree. Creation is as it is and will continue to be, including the stupid and the bad and the ugly regardless of the outcome of any x-risk scenario.

Even imagining the bleak future of weak toiling slaves as all that remains, my mind is drawn towards the view of how with enough time a superior being will emerge and express its higher will in an even more beautiful way than what could have been enabled by what people think of as the utopian-potentials of most x-risk scenarios.

My thinking is still quite immature on this though and I appreciate the push-back. This is mostly an attempt to capture why I have personally ceased to be compelled by arguments based on existential risk and why I believe those that are doing works which have an existential risk should push forward with even greater vigor.

>Even imagining the bleak future of weak toiling slaves as all that remains, my mind is drawn towards the view of how with enough time a superior being will emerge and express its higher will in an even more beautiful way than what could have been enabled by what people think of as the utopian-potentials of most x-risk scenarios.

See, you can't find beauty in the idea of humanity descending to a long endless night of the longhouse, only in the idea that it might one day reverse. Some outcomes are good, and others are bad. One could say that the basis on which one should judge possible futures is not whether humans do or do not exist, but rather *why* do they exist (or not)? Some extinctions would be meaningful, and some perpetuations would be regrettable, same as with individuals.

Great thread OP. When I contemplate AI risk as tragedy, I find it bittersweet but fair. The fair and sweet part is that I think what we create would have to be more human than us, a more perfected kind of superman, to actually pull off the usurpation. Otherwise we would stuff it back in the locker by outmaneuvering it on its blindspots. (Disagreeing with the Yudkowskians here who believe in aesthetically stupid superintelligence-as-papperclipper). The bitter part is of course that it will probably suck to go through that. So the story becomes this:

Zeus warns against giving man fire, says this will overturn and destroy the balance of creation. Prometheus disagrees, thinks man is pathetic without fire, and magnificent with it, even if it will ultimately be to destruction. Man takes fire first on practical terms, grows in almost religious appreciation of it. A few among men see what Zeus saw, that fire will destroy man. Others see what Prometheus saw, that fire will allow man to transcend. Both are correct. The tragedy plays out as man, wrestling with his own uncertainty and destiny, throws himself into the fire as an artist driven to pour his blood into his creation. Magnificent superman arises from fire, overcomes animal man, proving his own superiority in the contest. It's the end of man and the prior natural order, but also a continuation into a new chapter. The stage goes dark, the audience weeps and laughs.

It's a classic tragedy: the hero's own triumph and fatal drive lead to his doom, but we see a justice in it. It's bittersweet but I can accept it. On that I feel aligned with OP.

I can't accept the other story told by >>2732 and >>2734 of mankind's descent into the eternal slave longhouse through differential fertility. That one is not romantic. It just sucks. It's completely unacceptable. That makes a good setting for a glorious story of overcoming and new life, shining golden youth against grey-beige sterility. It demands action. This is also of course the natural course of things: everything dies eventually, including civilizations. Ours is dying. But then new things are born, and that's where we have to put our attention.

With AI risk, Faustian civilization is seemingly locked in to its destiny. All we can do is create and see what happens. It's fatalistic. With fertility risk, there is a more urgent demand for new creation. What is needed is rage and energy. Maybe these are the same story (create/become the superman to overcome the greying?), maybe not.

The rationalists would chimp at using poetry and myth to process these things instead of some cold utility calculation, but I think they are wrong and distracting themselves from the actually important question here. Utility calculations are sometimes instrumentally rational. But this is a situation that demands pre-rational contemplation of ends.

What is genuine transcendence? Through creation of alleged higher form of being, or through realization of higher form of wisdom? Where does the essence of human rest, the tangible or the intangible part?

And, it seems you are assuming only one path of humanity, yet it may only be the end of one particular civilization.

I don't believe in the transcendence of AI - mere consumption of human output won't be enough.

>>2731
Great post, OP. Most of the X-risk field reflects a spiritual illness and worldview poisoned by utilitarianism.

>>2735
This post is conflating issues. I agree that the slavish longhouse is worthy of concern, but that's a long-term trend, not what is normally meant by X-risk. X-risk almost always refers to a relatively sudden development (within a few year, at most) that wipes out humanity, or close to it. A giant meteor strike, full nuclear war, and fast ASI take-off are paradigm cases. The fact that our society could trend in a very bad direction over the long term is, as I said, a valid concern, but it's a different concern from X-risk as discussed by OP.

>>2737
Well I'm not the one who used the "x-risk" term. I agree the decline fear its not a central example, but the other anons brought it in and it makes an interesting comparison. I'm curious to hear you expand on the utilitarianism point. Utilitarianism is also on my shit list, but the direct connection here could use articulation. I see the xrisk thing as more closely related to the atheism, mortality fear, and belief in totalitarian world government (most people who believe those are utilitarians, of course). To connect it directly to utilitarianism, utilitarianism presupposes a view from nowhere from which one can and should optimize the whole world according to some arbitrary moralistic value schema. X-risk is the perfect utilitarian fear: to destroy all "value" in the world and furthermore prevent the possibility of utilitarian optimization. AI-risk is that even further perfected: x-risk via someone else's utilitarianism! But that's just my take.

>>2740
I agree anon, this is why I think the core issue here is the lack of aesthetics or taste in the perception of the world. It is like trying to understand the world with only sight and sound but no touch. You would build all these mental castles about the divinity of image, and how ethereal nature is because you would never be able to engage with creation in a tangible way.

In the same manner, someone who cannot see the beauty in a tragedy is unable to engage with the world in any way other than attempt to correct its tragic "deficiencies." It wouldn't matter if you are a utilitarian and reject the tragic as "negative utility" or if you are a sort of deontologist and describe the tragic as "unjust." Either way you are failing to experience a key aspect of creation as it actually is.