I would invest in a couple of surgeries that would eliminate sleep apnea and give me top tier breathing and sleep. I’d get a cooling mattress. I’d get the best sauna. I’d get a personal trainer. I’d a personal chef to make me healthy/delicious food so I don’t get tempted by less optimal food. I’d get a house without any toxic building materials, and all globes would be full spectrum light with the ability to adjust to more red/less blue light. I’d get a full body red light therapy device that I can use while using the computer. I’d get a hot tub and a cold plunge. Full house water filtration. Full house air filtration.
I would donate money to numerous longevity groups/companies.
I would probably try lots of weird but more expensive health treatments.
Money will still matter, but not so much for anyone with a net worth of >$25k invested in the stock market? ($2.5 M isn’t too bad and what it can purchase)
Thanks to everyone who commented on the Permanent Moon Ownership post. I was trying to inspire people to think bigger than B2B SAAS employment in the New Year, but I think I got the tone wrong, and also said things that required more explanation than the literary form could offer. I might talk about them at more length, but here’s a brief summary of what I would have said in more declarative form:
This post was intended to counter a specific meme going around in Silicon Valley, and addressed primarily to the people spreading it. Poor people continue to have a hard time and a natural interest in becoming less poor, as always. The post, and everything below, is aimed at neurotic well-off people.
If we don’t get a crazy AI future, then human labor won’t be obsolete, and you won’t be in a permanent underclass (at least for that reason)
If we do get a crazy AI future, and the economy grows 100x (Industrial Revolution scale) or 1000000x (solar system colonization scale) in your lifetime, then you only need a little capital to remain as absolutely well-off as you are today. For example, after 100x growth, anyone with $25,000 in the stock market now would have $2.5 million.
If you don’t put away $25,000, then in order to stay equally well-off you only need for 1% (industrial scale) to 0.0001% (solar scale) of wealth to be redistributed through some combination of private charity and government welfare. Currently about 2% of income is redistributed via charity, and 25% via government (in the US). I glossed this as “you can get a moon in one of Dario Amodei’s galaxies”, and people had strong opinions on that exact example, but many people getting rich in AI have expressed interest in post-singularity charity, and I expect the 0.0001% - 1% target to be reached.
If you’re in one of the early industries to be affected by AI, you may have a very bad time before the economy can grow 100x or 1000000x. I wouldn’t describe this as a “permanent underclass” - it’s a subset of people, and their suffering is temporary - but it might be a very large subset, and it might continue longer than you can remain solvent. I agree it’s worth having savings ready to prepare against this scenario.
Some people have argued that you have to find a way to join an AI company, because AI company employees will form the new ruling class, with everyone else as serfs. I disagree. The main thing an AI company employee has that you don’t is AI company stock. But you can buy stock in Google, you may soon be able to buy stock in OpenAI and Anthropic, and even if not, you can get indirect exposure to these companies via stock in Amazon and Microsoft. I don’t recommend putting all your money in these stocks. But there’s no fundamental difference between a Google employee having 75% of their money in Google stock because they didn’t cash out their equity vs. you having 75% of your money in Google stock because you’re crazy and fail at diversification. So either put 75% of your money in Google stock or don’t (I recommend don’t), and don’t worry about how you need to join an AI company or be left out of the future oligarchy.
Gradual disempowerment (by humans or AI), coups by AI company executives, and techno-oligarchy by a tiny number of people are serious concerns. But you won’t join the oligarch class by starting a B2B SAAS company, and these concerns are more about democracy, freedom, inequality, and the meaning of life than about you personally being poor. The proper response to these scenarios (as the original post tried to argue) is to fight heroically against them and live forever in the pantheon of the benefactors of humanity - not to start a B2B SAAS company.
One way to think about all of this is that it’s important not to be very poor (you want enough capital to last through the transition period, aided by ballooning stock markets), and it might be extra good to be very rich (if you can be a literal oligarch, you have some new options available), but I don’t think going from 6-digit to 8-digit pre-singularity net worth gets you much more than pride.
Pride might matter - there could be permanent monetary inequality in a post-AGI world, and even if everyone is richer than today, your neighbor could be permanently richer than you (”a 20% bigger moon”), and this might grate for some people. But wealth is only one kind of potentially-permanent-inequality: Jeff Bezos, Bernie Sanders, Malala Yousafzai, Tyler Cowen, Dolly Parton, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chesley Sullenberger all have different types of status. Even if you’re thinking in terms of how you’ll be better than the Joneses in the distant changeless future, I encourage you to think bigger. Open Thread 415 - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
I think it’s ambitious to imagine that an AGI explosion would have any of the wealth trickle down to us. Bezos still has his workers peeing in bottles in warehouses. What will happen is that a tiny number of people will become trillionaires and they’ll hold even more power over the rest of us plebs.
Back when I was a kid a “millionaire” was a rare and seemingly powerful thing. Now it’s pretty meh. I bet we have a reasonable number of people with 7 or 8 figure net worths on this forum. And even then, people with 8 or 9 figure net worths are not really that powerful, not able to change politics nor influence society on a meaningful level. That privilege belongs, increasingly exclusively, to the multi-billionaire class now. So even if your Nvidia and Tesla shares increase 3-fold or 10-fold, or even 100-fold, it won’t translate to much IMO.
And IMO, anybody @AlexKChen considering Claude Max or ChatGPT Pro, and you have the funds - just go for it. Your time is presumably worth something, and surely you can extract the asking price worth of value out of it? I pay the $200/month for ChatGPT, and some people act like that’s crazy. But I can use it almost like an assistant - and where can I find an assistant who will work for $200/month? Even for an average middle-class worker I reckon ChatGPT could save you a couple of hours worth of work over an entire month, which should be worth $200. Sometimes the advice it gives is also really valuable and can save you money or time on other things. I recently used it to compare some insurance policies and it got me much more favourable terms and a lower cost than I’d have been able to do for myself.
Get some Cagrilintide to add to your Reta and it will significantly decrease your appetite just go slow with it to start as it can be overwhelming before you get acclimated to it. Start at 0.20mg for 4 weeks and then increase by 0.10mg per weekly dose per month until you find your sweet spot.
Probably more of the same things you buy, simply because the cost of living would increase, following this 3x miracle from the stock market. A large part of the US economy is stock market driven anyway. See : AI.
just go slow with it to start as it can be overwhelming before you get acclimated to it. Start at 0.20mg for 4 weeks and then increase by 0.10mg per weekly dose per month until you find your sweet spot.