Well said. We’ve been contemplating expanding our family lately and I have to say, I’ve been secretly thinking many of the same things. That said, if we want humanity to persist and have a chance of one day prospering alongside AI and other technologies to come, children seem like a pretty clear prerequisite (particularly from people like us who care about these bigger pictures). I personally believe there will likely be non-trivial socioeconomic inequality and strife in the wake of AGI, however, I believe that these timescales will be on the order of decades (not weeks or months). In short, I believe that raising future generations to care about the future of humanity is incredibly important.
On a brighter note, I personally think a few things could be worthwhile to think about in preparing our children for the uncertainty that will very likely come with a post-AGI world. Purely IMO and I realize these things are not available or practical for everyone but just wanted to share a few thoughts:
In an time when we increasingly can’t believe everything we see and read, kids need to learn to question appropriately, to reason probabilistically, think critically and most of all think for themselves.
AGI will more significantly disrupt white-collar job markets than blue collar job markets( with a few exceptions). Consequently, you might help your children develop some hard skills (eg. how to repair an appliance, build something with wood, patch clothing, change your car oil, an Arduino project etc.)
it will become increasing valuable to be more of a generalist (and one who is comfortable with change). Teach resilience and get them thinking about emotional intelligence from a young age.
I feel like it will be increasingly important to be involved with your local community and know your neighbors.
IMHO, The problem with kids and technology is less with IT and computers as it is with social media and the darker sides of the internet. I would actually prefer that my kids engage intellectually with an offline language model than to drop them in the deep end of the internets.
We frankly shouldn’t take our economic supply chains and food industries for granted. Understand where things come from, how they’re made, how to be more self sufficient. Grow a garden, tech kids basic horticulture, raise a pet chicken. If possible, lean towards living in an area with some local agriculture.
Not everyone needs to be a dedicated ‘prepper’… but if you own a home, maybe think about solar and water storage. Regardless, of where you live, minimal food stores not a bad idea. $100 of rice/beans and a bottle of multivitamins stored properly can feed a family for many months if desperate.
This is personal but I think we’re generally trending towards over structuring and micromanaging (ie. helicopter parenting) our kids which can lead to anxiety and lack of self-reliance. I think that is important to give younger children a bit more latitude and autonomy to learn to become comfortable on their own.
Needless to say, I don’t think social media (and most mainstream media) is healthy in any way for kids under 16ish, get them a flip phone. Get them involved with local groups for real-world socialization (eg. scouts, clubs, meetups, etc)
This isn’t easy of feasible for many but if you have the option and inclination, consider raising kids in a more rural environment at least for a while. If you believe that AI will bring socioeconomic instability, dense urban metropolitan area will be most impacted.
To preface, i didn’t mean to make this a central point and it was mostly directed at families (but also anyone with the interest and means) considering how critical food availability would be in an prolonged AI gone bad scenario when internet connectivity would likely be cut. There are many scenario’s where food (and retail at large) could be significantly disrupted due to lack of electronic payment : prolonged power outages, accidental cyber incidents, deliberate cyber attacks, internet shutoffs, and honestly: recognize how significantly our agricultural system is based on autonomous harvesting and AI. In any of these scenarios, electronic forms of payment would be non-operational within days. Even if you have some cash on hand, many retailers might close their doors (with or without social unrest).
Further, there are numerous reasons to think severe weather will worsen in many regions which can directly or indirectly interrupt food supplies. The reason I bring this up in the context of families becuase once you have kids, you realize how important safe food supplies are… most can source water fairly easily outside of dry desert regions but unless you’re in alaska or hawaii, canada or have a few acres of farmland, you might not realize how vulnerable our food system could be.
On the one hand, I understand your point that preparing for breakdown of the economy may be more important if the likelihood of disasters in general increases; even though the most catastrophic AI scenarios would not leave a space to flee to, maybe the likelihood of more mundane disasters also increases? However, it is also possible that the marginal expected value of investing time in such skills goes down. After all, in a more technological society, learning technology skills may be more important than before, so the opportunity cost goes up.
I’m not actually talking about a complete breakdown of economy or society, just significant shocks to retail, IT, and supply chains and longer term economic shifts.
If I may draw a historical parallel: we shut down our entire airline transportation industry for weeks after 9/11, reducing annual GDP about 0.5%. Not to trivialize the ~3000 deaths and related suffering that occurred but, IMO, AI-facilitated deliberate attacks by malicious actors or nation states could easily be orders of magnitude worse. I honestly don’t know exactly how capable and prepared the US government is of ‘shutting down’ the internet completely. This would be a huge decision but I would be very surprised if they don’t already have a protocol in place for major catastrophic cyber scenarios that effectively does exactly this.
I suspect it might only take one order of magnitude (i.e., 30,000 deaths) perhaps two, before the Federal Agencies that be, pull the plug at every ISP and every telecom data provider for months. 3 OOM, it could be years. Yes, the consequences would be economically catastrophic.… and yes, there would probably be some hacky half-effective work-arounds via, decentralized networks, RF, satellite etc. but yes it could absolutely happened.
Information and computing Technologies would still have limited function in society but it wouldn’t be long before we saw some massive shifts in how digital tech-centric our economic future remained.
You think that with a relevant probability, major catastrophic events will happen that lead to situations in which traditional non-digital “prepper” skills are relevant,
and therefore, parents or families should invest a larger share of their own and their children’s time and resources into learning such skills,
compared to a world that was not “on the eve of AI”.
I’m not clear on what you mean by ‘relevant probability’, however, yes, I do think that we will see AGI within two decades, and with respect to AI,
P(massive job displacement) is high, perhaps 30-50%, P(millions die / acute catastrophe) is perhaps 3-6% and P(billions die / doom) is perhaps 0.2-0.5%
So, I’d say P(catastrophe) is not negligible and will likely slowly rise over time (so long as Information technology generally improves). If it does happened, I would not be surprised if governments take drastic action including potential broad blanket internet blackouts which would increase the value of certain non-IT skills.
I do worry about economic stability during any AI takeoff because the lack thereof could severely inhibit our ability to respond.
I think the term ‘prepper’ skills is a tad derogatory and perhaps simplistic, but I do believe that we are slowly loosing many of those skill sets that contribute to self-sufficiency and I do believe some skills associated with ‘prepping’ are valuable (i.e., basic first aid, CPR, orienteering, navigation, engineering, construction, carpentry, mechanical repair, basic agriculture, PPE, maintaining some food/water supply, etc.). Obviously, I am not talking about the more extreme fringes of prepping which becomes a different conversation.
I did not intend the word ‘prepper’ to be detogatory, but to be a word for ‘classical’ preparedness skills.
While I understand your risk assessment and it may be true that increasing societal risk makes such prepper skills more valuable, I think it neglects the problem that ‘digital’ skills, both for job qualifications and for disaster situations, may also become more valuable than before. As time is still only 24 hours a day, it is not clear how the ‘life preparedness curriculum’ composition should be different compared to, for example, growing up 20 years ago.
Storms are a pretty common issue to have to weather that can cut off access to power, water, and buying food for a time (and potentially damage your property). Tend to be what I think about first for disaster preparedness at least.
Not directly for me, I’m not the person you were asking, just mentioned one it’s generally useful in. Pretty much any disaster that might meddle in normal functioning outside your home helps to have a bit stored up to get through, though, storms are just ones I expect will happen regardless (in my climate).
If I had to predict some AI-specific disaster, though, seizing too much electrical power or diverting more water supply than planned for in a scenario where it’s growing too fast might be among them still.
2. AGI will more significantly disrupt white-collar job markets than blue collar job markets( with a few exceptions). Consequently, you might help your children develop some hard skills (eg. how to repair an appliance, build something with wood, patch clothing, change your car oil, an Arduino project etc.)
If we really see AI radically changing everything, why should this assessment still be correct in 10 years? I assume that 30 years ago, people thought the opposite was true. It seems hard to be sure about what to teach children. I do not really see what the uniquely usefull skills of a human will be in 2040 or 2050. Nonetheless, developing these skills as a hobby, without really expecting that to teach something specific as a basic job skill, may be a good idea, also for your point 3.
Well said. We’ve been contemplating expanding our family lately and I have to say, I’ve been secretly thinking many of the same things. That said, if we want humanity to persist and have a chance of one day prospering alongside AI and other technologies to come, children seem like a pretty clear prerequisite (particularly from people like us who care about these bigger pictures). I personally believe there will likely be non-trivial socioeconomic inequality and strife in the wake of AGI, however, I believe that these timescales will be on the order of decades (not weeks or months). In short, I believe that raising future generations to care about the future of humanity is incredibly important.
On a brighter note, I personally think a few things could be worthwhile to think about in preparing our children for the uncertainty that will very likely come with a post-AGI world. Purely IMO and I realize these things are not available or practical for everyone but just wanted to share a few thoughts:
In an time when we increasingly can’t believe everything we see and read, kids need to learn to question appropriately, to reason probabilistically, think critically and most of all think for themselves.
AGI will more significantly disrupt white-collar job markets than blue collar job markets( with a few exceptions). Consequently, you might help your children develop some hard skills (eg. how to repair an appliance, build something with wood, patch clothing, change your car oil, an Arduino project etc.)
it will become increasing valuable to be more of a generalist (and one who is comfortable with change). Teach resilience and get them thinking about emotional intelligence from a young age.
I feel like it will be increasingly important to be involved with your local community and know your neighbors.
IMHO, The problem with kids and technology is less with IT and computers as it is with social media and the darker sides of the internet. I would actually prefer that my kids engage intellectually with an offline language model than to drop them in the deep end of the internets.
We frankly shouldn’t take our economic supply chains and food industries for granted. Understand where things come from, how they’re made, how to be more self sufficient. Grow a garden, tech kids basic horticulture, raise a pet chicken. If possible, lean towards living in an area with some local agriculture.
Not everyone needs to be a dedicated ‘prepper’… but if you own a home, maybe think about solar and water storage. Regardless, of where you live, minimal food stores not a bad idea. $100 of rice/beans and a bottle of multivitamins stored properly can feed a family for many months if desperate.
This is personal but I think we’re generally trending towards over structuring and micromanaging (ie. helicopter parenting) our kids which can lead to anxiety and lack of self-reliance. I think that is important to give younger children a bit more latitude and autonomy to learn to become comfortable on their own.
Needless to say, I don’t think social media (and most mainstream media) is healthy in any way for kids under 16ish, get them a flip phone. Get them involved with local groups for real-world socialization (eg. scouts, clubs, meetups, etc)
This isn’t easy of feasible for many but if you have the option and inclination, consider raising kids in a more rural environment at least for a while. If you believe that AI will bring socioeconomic instability, dense urban metropolitan area will be most impacted.
About your “prepper” points, it would be helpful to know the scenario you have in mind here.
To preface, i didn’t mean to make this a central point and it was mostly directed at families (but also anyone with the interest and means) considering how critical food availability would be in an prolonged AI gone bad scenario when internet connectivity would likely be cut. There are many scenario’s where food (and retail at large) could be significantly disrupted due to lack of electronic payment : prolonged power outages, accidental cyber incidents, deliberate cyber attacks, internet shutoffs, and honestly: recognize how significantly our agricultural system is based on autonomous harvesting and AI. In any of these scenarios, electronic forms of payment would be non-operational within days. Even if you have some cash on hand, many retailers might close their doors (with or without social unrest).
Further, there are numerous reasons to think severe weather will worsen in many regions which can directly or indirectly interrupt food supplies. The reason I bring this up in the context of families becuase once you have kids, you realize how important safe food supplies are… most can source water fairly easily outside of dry desert regions but unless you’re in alaska or hawaii, canada or have a few acres of farmland, you might not realize how vulnerable our food system could be.
On the one hand, I understand your point that preparing for breakdown of the economy may be more important if the likelihood of disasters in general increases; even though the most catastrophic AI scenarios would not leave a space to flee to, maybe the likelihood of more mundane disasters also increases? However, it is also possible that the marginal expected value of investing time in such skills goes down. After all, in a more technological society, learning technology skills may be more important than before, so the opportunity cost goes up.
I’m not actually talking about a complete breakdown of economy or society, just significant shocks to retail, IT, and supply chains and longer term economic shifts.
If I may draw a historical parallel: we shut down our entire airline transportation industry for weeks after 9/11, reducing annual GDP about 0.5%. Not to trivialize the ~3000 deaths and related suffering that occurred but, IMO, AI-facilitated deliberate attacks by malicious actors or nation states could easily be orders of magnitude worse. I honestly don’t know exactly how capable and prepared the US government is of ‘shutting down’ the internet completely. This would be a huge decision but I would be very surprised if they don’t already have a protocol in place for major catastrophic cyber scenarios that effectively does exactly this.
I suspect it might only take one order of magnitude (i.e., 30,000 deaths) perhaps two, before the Federal Agencies that be, pull the plug at every ISP and every telecom data provider for months. 3 OOM, it could be years. Yes, the consequences would be economically catastrophic.… and yes, there would probably be some hacky half-effective work-arounds via, decentralized networks, RF, satellite etc. but yes it could absolutely happened.
Information and computing Technologies would still have limited function in society but it wouldn’t be long before we saw some massive shifts in how digital tech-centric our economic future remained.
I try to summarize your position:
You think that with a relevant probability, major catastrophic events will happen that lead to situations in which traditional non-digital “prepper” skills are relevant,
and therefore, parents or families should invest a larger share of their own and their children’s time and resources into learning such skills,
compared to a world that was not “on the eve of AI”.
Right?
I’m not clear on what you mean by ‘relevant probability’, however, yes, I do think that we will see AGI within two decades, and with respect to AI,
P(massive job displacement) is high, perhaps 30-50%,
P(millions die / acute catastrophe) is perhaps 3-6% and
P(billions die / doom) is perhaps 0.2-0.5%
So, I’d say P(catastrophe) is not negligible and will likely slowly rise over time (so long as Information technology generally improves). If it does happened, I would not be surprised if governments take drastic action including potential broad blanket internet blackouts which would increase the value of certain non-IT skills.
I do worry about economic stability during any AI takeoff because the lack thereof could severely inhibit our ability to respond.
I think the term ‘prepper’ skills is a tad derogatory and perhaps simplistic, but I do believe that we are slowly loosing many of those skill sets that contribute to self-sufficiency and I do believe some skills associated with ‘prepping’ are valuable (i.e., basic first aid, CPR, orienteering, navigation, engineering, construction, carpentry, mechanical repair, basic agriculture, PPE, maintaining some food/water supply, etc.). Obviously, I am not talking about the more extreme fringes of prepping which becomes a different conversation.
I did not intend the word ‘prepper’ to be detogatory, but to be a word for ‘classical’ preparedness skills.
While I understand your risk assessment and it may be true that increasing societal risk makes such prepper skills more valuable, I think it neglects the problem that ‘digital’ skills, both for job qualifications and for disaster situations, may also become more valuable than before. As time is still only 24 hours a day, it is not clear how the ‘life preparedness curriculum’ composition should be different compared to, for example, growing up 20 years ago.
Storms are a pretty common issue to have to weather that can cut off access to power, water, and buying food for a time (and potentially damage your property). Tend to be what I think about first for disaster preparedness at least.
So that is not related to AI, right?
Not directly for me, I’m not the person you were asking, just mentioned one it’s generally useful in. Pretty much any disaster that might meddle in normal functioning outside your home helps to have a bit stored up to get through, though, storms are just ones I expect will happen regardless (in my climate).
If I had to predict some AI-specific disaster, though, seizing too much electrical power or diverting more water supply than planned for in a scenario where it’s growing too fast might be among them still.
If we really see AI radically changing everything, why should this assessment still be correct in 10 years? I assume that 30 years ago, people thought the opposite was true. It seems hard to be sure about what to teach children. I do not really see what the uniquely usefull skills of a human will be in 2040 or 2050. Nonetheless, developing these skills as a hobby, without really expecting that to teach something specific as a basic job skill, may be a good idea, also for your point 3.