It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Effective altruists used to be known for their insistence on thinking about the very long run; much more of the movement now is concerned about the development of AI in the next year.

But amidst the obvious, overwhelming grief, my strongest memory of that time was of a feeling that can only be described as a deep and abiding love. There was a profound, shared humanity, and extraordinary kindness was shared between complete strangers on an unconditional basis, for days and weeks on end. It sounds like a fairy tale, or the kind of thing that happens in a movie, or that would get dismissed as impossible by the "smart", cynical view. It really did, happen, though. People went through an unimaginable trauma, and an impossible circumstance, and we genuinely spent hours or even days thinking it might be the end of the world, and the reaction that happened was that people came together spontaneously to take care of each other in ways both minuscule and profound

Shortly after the news had broken, I had gone outside into the street. We all did. Everyone poured out onto the sidewalks and into the streets themselves (all traffic was shut down in a way that we wouldn’t see again until Covid hit)