Most rationalists are heavily invested into AGI in non-monetary ways — career paths, free time, hopes for longevity/coordination breakthroughs. As other commenters have pointed out, if humanity achieves aligned AGI in the future, financial returns will feasibly be far less important. Given that, maybe the best investments are to bet against AGI as a hedge for humanity not achieving it.
There are 3 futures: If we achieve aligned AGI, we win the game and nothing else matters*. If we achieve misaligned AGI, we die and nothing else matters. If we fail to achieve AGI at all, then we’ve wasted a lot of our time, careers, and hopes. In that case, we want investments to fall back on.
In that 3rd future, what commodities and equities are most successful? Can we buy those now?
*subject to accepting the singularity-like premise.
Some people think that there will be something reasonably described as a singularity, but that money (or more generally property rights) will still plausibly matter.
Even if you don’t think that, we might be able to predict that the market will ignore any *other* possibility (such as a singularity that obsoletes money). So we can predict that the market will predict that certain stocks will be valuable. So we can get money just ahead of the singularity, and then maybe use it to avert bad outcomes. Or maybe not, but that’s one way it might make sense to bet on AGI even if you’re confident it will obsolete money.
Most rationalists are heavily invested into AGI in non-monetary ways — career paths, free time, hopes for longevity/coordination breakthroughs. As other commenters have pointed out, if humanity achieves aligned AGI in the future, financial returns will feasibly be far less important. Given that, maybe the best investments are to bet against AGI as a hedge for humanity not achieving it.
There are 3 futures: If we achieve aligned AGI, we win the game and nothing else matters*. If we achieve misaligned AGI, we die and nothing else matters. If we fail to achieve AGI at all, then we’ve wasted a lot of our time, careers, and hopes. In that case, we want investments to fall back on.
In that 3rd future, what commodities and equities are most successful? Can we buy those now?
*subject to accepting the singularity-like premise.
Some people think that there will be something reasonably described as a singularity, but that money (or more generally property rights) will still plausibly matter.
Even if you don’t think that, we might be able to predict that the market will ignore any *other* possibility (such as a singularity that obsoletes money). So we can predict that the market will predict that certain stocks will be valuable. So we can get money just ahead of the singularity, and then maybe use it to avert bad outcomes. Or maybe not, but that’s one way it might make sense to bet on AGI even if you’re confident it will obsolete money.