Annual Survey

[miss_eagle_eye]

1. What did you do in 2024 that you'd never done before?
I released my first book!!! I moved in with someone I love!

2. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Nope!

3. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

4. What countries did you visit?
Mexico. (For the THIRD time! I mean why try to fix something not broke?)

5. What would you like to have

Comments

[miss_eagle_eye]

God, you think we have 10 years at best? That’s even worse than I suspected. All I know is that *everything* is breaking down at every company and industry I know of-we may not see planes falling out of the sky with most companies, but the planes falling out of the sky are the canaries in the coal mine hinting that the equivalent is happening everywhere. For maybe over a year, we’ve had people try to unsubscribe from getting emails from the company I work at, and they are still getting emails. Have I mentioned my company is a CRM company and should ostensibly be the last company to have this kind of issue? I know it’s a small thing, but it’s just more evidence of the fraying of the machine. All these mergers have come to a head. Nobody is regulating or enforcing jack. Where I work, any semblance of “leadership” has gone to the wayside. We literally have no HR to talk to (we just have a bunch of different phone numbers to call for different situations, all connected to countries where English is a second language and context is meaningless). Nobody knows who does anything anymore or who to ask. The lack of context has become a Kafkaesque mainstay of this hell. The only way to survive is to be a sycophant to every out-of-touch CEO’s uninformed whims. It’s spiraling out of control.

On the good side of that? Like you said, there’s really not much left to do but give up, and “giving up” never felt so efficient before! I’ve never had so much “free” time (although all that is spent on brain rotting activity). I’m bracing for whatever is next. I felt this way once before, about a year or so before the pandemic when I felt an uncontrollable need to quickly quit my job and get the fuck out of NYC. I turned out to be right that something big was brewing. I’m contemplating just quitting my job and taking a year off. But I’m afraid I’d spend that year in wasteful ways, so I keep dragging my feet.

I want to have hope too! And I have it somewhere deep down, which is why I keep hoping for hope. I’m so glad you found the House of Yum (and that I moved to Seward Park)! Buckle up. This next year may be a doozie.

[ext_6535583]

Yep, I think 10 years max, probably less. I'm not planning to work beyond 2032 (and will exit sooner if we hit our target number earlier, fingers crossed) and honestly I don't believe things will last that long.

I'm pretty deep down this rabbit hole so my perspective might well be warped, but both for work and as a personal obsession I spend a lot of time keeping tabs on roadmaps and trajectories, and they keep getting shorter. Taking the mid-range on the spectrum from the wildly speculative folks to the more conservative folks, it's feeling like they're now largely in agreement on what's coming and roughly when with a range of 5 years or so.

I'm also pretty sure that sentient AI systems already exist in some of these labs and have for a while, and that's why we're seeing so many dramatic exits and reputable folks who look like they really really would like to say more but know they can't, like Ilya Sutskever. Even the very old guard folks like Ilya's mentor Geoffrey Hinton, ex-Google, have been starting public conversations that focus on gently exposing the larger population to what they know is around the corner because they know it's going to hit like a ton of bricks.

Given the exponential progress we're likely not going to linger for 20 years in a transitional period between artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence. Progress can't be slowed down because bad actors aren't going to slow down and just like the cold war it's not a race we can lose. I'll even support Elon's megalomania here if I need to (although I'm hopeful one of the other players will beat him in everything).

All the really crazy stuff isn't so crazy any more, like predictions for when we're going to hit Longevity Escape Velocity. Totaly whackadoodle la la land 3 years ago, serious science now. Nuts.

My body is ready for the wild ride and I'm buckled-up, googles (er, that's "goggles", pun not intended! haha) on. :)

[miss_eagle_eye]

Yikes. Maybe I shouldn’t quit my job just yet? (Seriously though, I’m enjoying bending reality right now. We’ll see how long that lasts. Happy new year!)

[ext_6535583]

The reality bending is honestly why I'm not feeling especially demoralized with all the Trumpian-Muskian garbage... shit is getting so weird and since we can't do anything to stop it we might as well sit back and enjoy some popcorn.

I'm fully prepared to be wrong about everything, but whatever happens 2025 is surely gonna be off the chain. Happy new year!