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The compulsion
1 min read

The compulsion

YOLO, for real

Like many people, I struggle with my legacy. What will I leave humanity? I’ve been successful in nearly every sense of the word, but I hardly ever feel successful. I’ve always just put my head down and banged shit out. So what? There’s never been any other option for me.

Some of that is mental illness. Some of it is escapism. Some of it is fear. All of it is grit.

I think if I leave a dent in the universe at all, it will have to do with artificial intelligence. How? I’m not quite sure yet, but I can’t come up with anything else that would matter in the least and so I’m hanging my hat on that. No pressure.

Is my purpose to read the entire internet and a thousand books and assimilate all of that knowledge into something that helps other humans (or our successors) advance something?

Is my purpose to make and share beautiful photos? Is it to make people laugh? Is it to help others be all they can be? Is it to engineer stuff? Is it to code? Is it to teach adults how to read? Is it to have opinions on a particularly potent style of beer?

It’s impossible to quantify “success” when you think about life at this all-encompassing scale, and if you zoom out just a little further it’s as if you never existed at all. What a shitty paradox.

We’re close to a point where the impossibly slow, random, ladder of evolution simply ceases to matter. We’ll be able to give human evolution purpose, reason…an active goal. Is the ultimate measure of success having a hand in that? Making something that eventually displaces humans?

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