What happens when you don’t need to work anymore? What happens when your days are free and open, as though you were totally retired, forever?
These questions are from a post about how to live in a post-AGI / “solved” world by
, but they are very similar to the questions anyone who retires or takes a sabbatical asks themselves (modulo the word “forever”). I would know; these kinds of questions rattle around my head near-daily.I feel that I got quite lucky in deciding to take a sabbatical when I did. Even if LLMs didn’t automate me out of a job (I am very skeptical in the short/medium term), it’s become glaringly obvious that any identity built around being smart is under serious threat. If you think you’re special because you’re a knowledge worker or know things that can be looked up on the Internet, probably time to think again. Intelligence is quickly becoming a near-free commodity. There will clearly be major impacts to the economy & what things remain valuable, but I don’t want to speculate on those here. Instead, let’s talk about terminal desires.
What are terminal desires/goals?
From this article by
:Goals (or desires or values) lie somewhere on the spectrum between terminal and instrumental. Money's (nearly always) an instrumental goal: it gets us other things we want, like sustenance, shelter and luxuries. But if you were to try to explain to me why you like sour foods or why you enjoy seeing your friends succeed, you might find it surprisingly difficult. This is the hallmark of a terminal goal: it's an end in and of itself, and doesn't require justification in terms of other goals it helps fulfill.
Terminal goals are your grounding. They're the roots of the mental structure under-girding your motivation, and they're the true underlying reasons why you do everything.
Basically, things you do for their own sake.
Naturally, I wanted to think through what my own terminal values were. Due to an abundance of free time and LLMs making coding way faster & more entertaining, I built a small web app last week to do pairwise comparisons to figure this out. Give it a try if you want.
Here are my results:
Curiosity, trolling, and a desire to fulfill your potential/purpose. Sounds about right.
A lot of my time the last few months has been spent reading books, learning interesting things, and trying to improve my learning itself. Every time I’m reading a nonfiction book or article or idea, though, a small voice always asks “what’s the point? an LLM knows this already & could summarize/explain it 10x faster than you with the right prompt.” Super annoying, especially because it’s obviously correct. I’ve used LLMs a ton for learning things, dissecting articles/papers, etc. So why spend time learning?
One answer is with another set of questions:
If life is long, then what’s the rush?
And if life is short, what else would I rather be doing?
Curiosity is my top terminal desire, and probably by a significant margin. Not easy to change that. And even before LLMs, it was already the case that there were people in the world that were orders of magnitude more intelligent than me, better at learning, etc. They just weren’t immediately accessible, or maybe were unlucky and lived in a poor part of the world and died early of malnutrition. Things haven’t changed that much. I will still never be the most intelligent person. It’s now just more obvious that that’s the case, and there is a magic button to short-circuit the learning process entirely if I want.
Back to the David Shapiro post:
Somewhere along the way, I lost that spark. Everything had to have a real purpose, a measurable impact, and definitive value. Everything I did had to succeed. I became a perfectionist, constantly optimizing for maximum impact rather than just derping around for the fun of it. I learned the river mentality of life.
Base-building games are extremely popular now. These are a particular kind of sandbox games where there are resources you can glean from the landscape and build an ever larger and more sophisticated fortress. There are build trees of gear and equipment you can add to defend the homestead, provide you with food, water, and oxygen. I see these games and I’m like “What’s the point?” My nephew just shrugs and says “I have a cool base.”
Ultimately, what is there except the ability to shrug and say “I have a cool life” ?