I have been on a mission to do as much good as possible since I was quite young, and I decided to prioritize X-risk and improving the long-term future at around age 13. Toward this end, growing up I studied philosophy, psychology, social entrepreneurship, business, economics, the history of information technology, and futurism.
A few years ago I wrote a book draft I was calling “Ways to Save The World” or “Paths to Utopia” which imagined broad innovative strategies for preventing existential risk and improving the long-term future.
Upon discovering Effective Altruism in January 2022, while preparing to start a Master’s of Social Entrepreneurship degree at the University of Southern California, I did a deep dive into EA and rationality and decided to take a closer look at the possibility of AI caused X-risk and lock-in, and moved to Berkeley to do longtermist research and community building work.
I am now researching “Deep Reflection,” processes for determining how to get to our best achievable future, including interventions such as “The Long Reflection,” “Coherent Extrapolated Volition,” and “Good Reflective Governance.”
I really like this. I’ve been thinking it would be good to have a market that measures positive and negative externalities and includes those in prices of goods, but I noticed that a shortcoming of this was that it didn’t really directly address existential risk and I think tour suggestion is a really interesting way of trying to have that included. After all, x-risk seems like the most impact of all and just incentivizing the positive externalities from, say, AI, could actually have negative impact if it doesn’t account for this.